RUSE Returns to Steam 11 Years After Ubisoft Killed It

Eleven years off the market. That's how long RUSE, one of the most inventive RTS games of the PS3/360 era, sat in digital limbo after Ubisoft yanked it from Steam in December 2015. As of yesterday, it's back. Developer Eugen Systems announced on Steam that it has relaunched the WW2 strategy game as a Definitive Edition, priced at $29.99, with every piece of previously released DLC included and full Steam Deck support.

The story of how RUSE disappeared is a familiar one if you've followed Ubisoft's handling of older titles. When the game was pulled in 2015, Ubisoft cited "the expiration of licensing rights over certain military items within the game." Eugen Systems, despite having built the thing, couldn't do anything about it. "The game didn't officially belong to us," the studio wrote in its relaunch post. "Sidelined due to distribution constraints, we could do nothing in the subsequent years to help the players who contacted us for assistance or tried to obtain the game." That's a polite way of saying the developer watched its own creation rot on the shelf because a publisher let the paperwork lapse.

What's changed is that Eugen Systems is now listed as both developer and publisher on the Steam page, meaning Ubisoft is entirely out of the picture. Nobody has confirmed exactly how Eugen reacquired the rights, but given Ubisoft's well-documented financial struggles and ongoing restructuring, it's not hard to connect the dots. I'm glad the game ended up back with the people who actually made it. That's the outcome you want to see when a publisher loses interest in a catalogue title.

197 Positive, 2 Negative

Early reception has been overwhelmingly warm. Steam user reviews since the relaunch sit at 197 positive against just two negative. If you already owned RUSE on Steam, the DLC and updates are free; this isn't a remaster being sold back to you, it's the same game with extras bundled in. Old saves and replays won't load in the updated version to prevent crashes, but Eugen has made the original build available as a "Compatibility Branch" in the Steam properties for anyone who wants access.

For anyone who missed RUSE the first time around, the pitch is simple: it's a WW2 RTS where deception matters more than APM. Players deploy RUSE cards mid-battle to camouflage troops, send out decoy assaults, spy on opponents, or enact radio silence to hide their own movements. It supported up to eight players in multiplayer and had a full single-player campaign. The game originally launched in 2010 for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, and even supported PlayStation Move controllers, which tells you everything about the era it came from.

The $29.99 price tag has drawn some complaints from players who feel a 16-year-old game shouldn't cost that much. I get the instinct, but this is a complete package with all DLC, modern compatibility work, and Steam Deck verification from a small independent studio that had to fight to get its own game back. Compared to some of the remaster pricing we've seen from major publishers charging $50 or $70 for a coat of paint, this feels reasonable. Eugen Systems also shut down RUSE's online servers in 2024 through Ubisoft, so the fact that the game is playable at all in 2026 is something the studio clearly had to work for.

Eugen's more recent output includes Warno, a modern-military RTS that left early access in 2024, and Steel Division: Normandy '44. RUSE joining that catalogue under Eugen's own publishing label is a good look for a studio that's been quietly consistent in a genre most big publishers abandoned years ago.