'XDefiant' Will Shut Down, Another Black Eye For Ubisoft In A Year ...

XDefiant

As recently as October, XDefiant director Mark Rubin claimed that circulating rumors were false, and XDefiant was not shutting down. In fact, they were looking ahead to year 2 content. Whether that was true at the time or not, it’s not true now. XDefiant is in fact being killed off, and will close down for good this upcoming summer, Rubin confirmed today. Here’s part of his statement:

“Free-to-play, in particular, is a long journey. Many free-to-play games take a long time to find their footing and become profitable. It’s a long journey that Ubisoft and the teams working on the game were prepared to make until very recently. But unfortunately, the journey became too much to sensibly continue.”

Ubisoft has clearly put Rubin in a tough spot here, as it does seem like the plan even back in October may have been to continue on, but that “recently” no longer was the case. Before this, there were reports that the playercount of the game had fallen perilously low with no real signs of recovery. It was once a high profile, if oddly named, shooter project that was meant to harken back to the glory days of Call of Duty. Instead, it ultimately failed to attract an audience, and this year’s Call of Duty is more popular than ever.

There are two stories here, one about Ubisoft and one about the larger market.

2024 has been an utter disaster for Ubisoft. Among its two biggest titles of the year, Star Wars Outlaws underperformed, ending up in the lower half of Ubisoft’s AAA titles in terms of review scores, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows had to be delayed out of 2024 entirely after both cultural controversies and Outlaws scaring them into thinking the game needed more work. Ubisoft is still launching NFT games in 2024. It is still claiming that Beyond Good and Evil 2, teased in 2017, is still somehow in the works. Its stock price has plummetted and there have been reported talks about taking the company private due to how badly things are going. The list goes on, and XDefiant’s closure is icing at this point. Terrible tasting icing.

XDefiant

The second story is just how hard it has become for any new game to break into the competitive multiplayer shooter market. XDefiant tried to be a laundry list of things hardcore shooter players supposedly were asking for, but it didn’t matter. It also did not help that Ubisoft married it to its own launcher rather than putting the f2p game on Steam, another baffling decision.

No, XDefiant was not Concord, shut down after two weeks in one of the worst disasters in video game history, but the end result is the same. And it goes to show you have to really stand out in significant ways to make a mark in the current state of the industry where everyone is content mostly playing Fortnite and Call of Duty. Sometimes that can happen like when say, Valve makes a new shooter for the first time a decade (Deadlock) or you make Overwatch with Marvel’s entire hero and villain roster. But most shooters? Good luck, you’ll need it. XDefiant didn’t have it.

But come on, what was with that name?

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