Ubisoft managed to make a rather spectacular mistake with the Steam release of Heroes of Might and Magic III Complete Edition. The publisher successfully launched the game on Valve’s storefront, except for one fairly important detail: the actual game was missing.
Players who purchased and downloaded the classic quickly noticed something was very wrong. Instead of receiving the full game, Steam initially downloaded only around 23 KB of files.
Yes, kilobytes.
For a brief period, Ubisoft had effectively managed to sell and release a game without including the game itself.
Heroes of Might and Magic III launched practically empty
The strange situation occurred following Ubisoft’s release of Heroes of Might and Magic III Complete Edition on Steam.
Players naturally expected to download the classic strategy game after purchasing it. Instead, the initial Steam installation reportedly contained little more than a tiny executable.
The download came in at approximately 23.49 KB, an obvious warning sign considering a complete PC game should be considerably larger.
Attempting to launch the included Heroes3.exe did not suddenly reveal some incredible compression technology either. Players were instead greeted by a command prompt.
The actual Heroes of Might and Magic III game files simply weren’t there.
Ubisoft forgot the most important part
Game launches can go wrong in plenty of ways.
Servers can collapse under heavy traffic. Day-one patches can introduce unexpected bugs. Store pages can display incorrect information. Developers can accidentally ship unfinished assets.
Forgetting to include the actual game, however, belongs in a completely different category.
Ubisoft had essentially provided Steam with the packaging while leaving the product itself behind.
Unsurprisingly, players quickly noticed the problem and began reporting it. There was little troubleshooting that users could realistically perform because the issue wasn’t with their computers or Steam installations.
There simply wasn’t a game to launch.
A 770 MB update eventually fixed the problem
Thankfully, Ubisoft eventually corrected the mistake.
Roughly 11 hours after the problematic release, an update of around 770 MB reportedly appeared on Steam. This time, the download actually contained the Heroes of Might and Magic III files players expected to receive in the first place.
Ubisoft subsequently apologized for the issue and confirmed that the problem had been resolved.
Players who purchased the game should therefore now receive the proper files instead of the tiny placeholder installation.
Still, the fact that the problem survived long enough to reach paying customers makes the situation particularly amusing.
Digital distribution creates some bizarre situations
There is also a slightly more serious side to this otherwise hilarious mistake.
Digital storefronts have made publishing games considerably easier, but incidents like this demonstrate how dependent customers are on publishers correctly maintaining their releases.
Someone purchasing a physical PC game decades ago would expect the necessary game data to actually exist on the discs inside the box. With digital distribution, customers instead depend on whatever files the publisher has uploaded to the platform.
In this particular case, Ubisoft could simply push another update and correct the mistake.
However, it remains a funny example of what can happen when something goes wrong behind the scenes.
At least Ubisoft fixed its booboo
Ultimately, no permanent damage appears to have been done. Ubisoft corrected the Steam package, players received the missing files, and Heroes of Might and Magic III Complete Edition can now actually be played.
That doesn’t make the original launch any less ridiculous.
There have been broken PC releases, unfinished games and disastrous day-one patches throughout gaming history.
Ubisoft somehow found another option:
Release the game first and add the game later.
