Ubisoft has announced that they are shutting down XDefiant.
Ubisoft announced XDefiant as a military shooter themed around crossovers between different Ubisoft IPs in 2021. After months of private and public tests, the game was launched on May 21, 2024.
The launch was a record breaker for Ubisoft, earning its first million unique players in 2 ½ hours, and 3 million unique players in 48 hours. By June, they had amassed 11 million players.
But XDefiant failed to retain the player base in the succeeding months, which led to troubling rumors that Ubisoft was already planning to shut down the game. We first reported on such a rumor last August, and Ubisoft, especially XDefiant’s director Mark Rubin, repeatedly denied these rumors.
Today, the XDefiant account shared this message:
“Dear Players,
Important message: XDEFIANT IS SUNSETTING!
Thank you for your incredible support and dedication to XDEFIANT. We regret to inform you that we are initiating the sunset process starting today, December 3, 2024.
As a result, new downloads, player registrations and purchases will no longer be available.
Season 3 will still launch. The servers will remain active, and the game will be fully playable until June 3rd, 2025.”
Mark Rubin also shared a personal message. We’ll focus on this excerpt:
“I am, of course, heartbroken to have to be writing this post. Yes, this game has been a personal passion for me for years and yes, I know that not all challenges lead to victory, but I also want to recognize all of the developers who are being affected by this closure. Each and every one of them is a real person with a real life separate from our own and they have all put so much of their own passion into making this game.
And I hope that they can be proud of what they did achieve. I know that I will always be proud and grateful to have worked with such a great team! A team that really punched above its weight class.”
Rubin also touted how he pitched the game to Ubisoft. They endeavored to make the game free-to-play, with an arcade feel, and deliberately removing skill-based matchmaking.
He ended his statement by citing that he hopes that what the developers and fans take out of this is the value of continued communication between both parties, to improve the game.
This is one of the pivotal decisions Ubisoft has made at a time where the entire company is in crisis. Regardless of the merits of this game, or if Ubisoft could have made it succeed in a time where they were still more successful, they seem to be backing off as they have to hedge their bets between what commitments they need to keep, and what projects are more likely to succeed.
Ubisoft fully owns XDefiant and all the franchises under it, in the same way that it owned Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Star Wars Outlaws, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and Skull & Bones all have other parties that are holding Ubisoft accountable to make those titles succeed.
So even if these rumors had not been circulating, it was easy to predict that Ubisoft would cut XDefiant. As for now, it isn’t clear if this will be proven to be the right decision, but we’ll see in time.
