Ubisoft had high hopes for its free-to-play first person shooter, XDefiant, which launched back in May. But now the publisher has announced plans to wind the game down and fully shutter it in June 2025, according to a blog post from the publisher’s official website on Tuesday.
“Despite an encouraging start, the team’s passionate work, and a committed fan base, we’ve not been able to attract and retain enough players in the long run to compete at the level we aim for in the very demanding free-to-play FPS market,” Ubisoft Chief Studios and Portfolio Officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert said in the blog post. “As a result, the game is too far away from reaching the results required to enable further significant investment, and we are announcing that we will be sunsetting it.”
Starting immediately, XDefiant registration and downloads will no longer be available. Players who have purchased the Ultimate Founder’s Pack or have made any other in-game purchase within the last 30 days will be automatically fully refunded sometime within the next eight weeks.
Season 3 content will still launch at a future date, and matchmaking servers will remain online until June 2, 2025.
XDefiant features characters from Ubisoft’s other games, such as Splinter Cell and Watch Dogs.
Featuring fast-paced gameplay married with characters from popular Ubisoft games such as The Division, Splinter Cell and Watch Dogs, the publisher had hoped that XDefiant would compete with Call of Duty in the first-person shooter market.
XDefiant achieved one million players within the first two and a half hours of its launch window in May 2024, and averaged 300,000 concurrent players within the first 48 hours it was available to play.
But more recent reporting suggests that the concurrent player count dropped under 20,000 by August, and Ubisoft laid off ten XDefiant developers the very same month.
In September, XDefiant’s Executive Producer Mark Rubin refuted the rumors that the game was in danger of shutting down. “I just want to quickly address the status of the game. i.e. is the game dying. No, the game is absolutely not dying,” Rubin said at the time.
XDefiant’s sunsetting will result in more layoffs in an already fraught year for the games industry. Alongside shutting the game down, Ubisoft’s San Francisco and Osaka teams will be closed, and the Sydney production site will also be wound down. In total, 277 staff members are expected to be laid off.
Game companies have laid off a combined total of over 13,000 workers by September 2024. Over 11,000 games industry workers were laid off in 2023.
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