Formerly Defiant Game Developer Mark Rubin Announces His Retirement The Day After XDefiant’s Closure

Mark Rubin has officially announced his retirement from the video game industry.

As reported by Insider Gaming, he shared this statement on Twitter:

    As for me, I’ve decided to leave the industry and spend more time with my family so unfortunately you won’t be hearing about me making another game.

    I do care passionately about the shooter space and hope that someone else can pick up the flag that I was trying to carry and make games again that care about the players, treat them with respect and listen to what they have to say. Thank you again to everyone who had so much passion for XDefiant.

XDefiant released in May 2024, three years after Ubisoft originally announced it, and after multiple rounds of private and public playtests. Hype was strong in April 2023, when the XDefiant open beta reached the top of most played games streamed on Twitch.

Given how it already amassed a fanbase and became the subject of much discourse even before it released, it was absolutely surprising when Ubisoft announced they would wind down development in December of last year. That announcement came less than eight months into its launch, and the game itself had a lifetime of a little over a year.

While there were fans who had critiques for how the game was going, this is something of a norm in the live service space and can create a misleading picture of how popular a game is. To put this in perspective, every Call of Duty game always gets discourse over why it isn’t fun to play, or if the game is making erroneous bans. But it remains one of the most played games year-after-year, gamely competing with Fortnite and PUBG.

XDefiant’s fan hype also created a misleading picture, compared to how things were allegedly going on behind the scenes. In the months before and during its existence, rumors were going around that the XDefiant dev team had a toxic work environment, led by a proverbial ‘boys’ club’ at the top led by Mark Rubin and other managers. Rubin has never really responded to either debunk or confirm these rumors, even when he wasn’t shy about reacting to critics and trolls.

Rubin is an industry veteran with credits going back to 2003. He is best known for his tenure in Infinity Ward as producer, and later, executive producer for the Call of Duty games. This includes work on all three original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.

Part of the excitement around XDefiant surrounded Rubin, as another former Call of Duty producer, coming around to compete with the franchise with another original vision. Unlike his fellow Infinity Ward alumni in Vince Zampella, Rubin’s career outside Call of Duty hasn’t turned out to be as successful. Unfortunately for Rubin, while he will always be remembered as a major figure in Call of Duty‘s history, XDefiant ends his career on a sour note.