In an unsurprising turn of events, Ubisoft has announced that XDefiant, the not-so-popular competitive free-to-play shooter, will be shutting down in June of next year. The servers are set to go offline on June 3, 2025 but Ubisoft assures players the servers will be live and the game will be fully playable until then.
You can read their entire statement here.
Not even two months ago, XDefiant’s Executive producer Mark Rubin took to Twitter (now X) to state that there are no plans to shut down and that there were big plans for the game’s future. Fans jumped in quickly to back Rubin’s statement, calling recent rumors that the game would be shutting down “insane”. The timeline for these comments could be an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Cue the music.
The fact is, XDefiant did little to make waves in the free-to-play shooter space and did even less to define itself. Even Rubin makes a pretty accurate statement regarding the game’s lack of marketing. He is quoted as saying “we have done very little marketing so yes our numbers are down“- not exactly the type of thing you want to say on social media as an executive producer, especially amidst the frequent blunders Ubisoft has been making this year.
You can read Rubin’s full statement about the game shutting down right here.
Ubisoft has had a rough go of things this year first with Star Wars Outlaws not selling too well and being hit with massive criticism and then Assassin’s Creed Shadows being delayed after facing controversy for historical inaccuracy, among other things. Not to mention, but I will, that Ubisoft is still doubling down on the whole NFT gaming thing- obviously another disaster waiting to happen.
All of this on top of massive stock dives among countless poor business decisions, has lead many industry insiders to claim that Ubisoft is experiencing desperation on all fronts. Some suggest they may go private or are possibly looking for a buyout or sale of some kind to a bigger fish in the industry. Although we don’t know who would want to invest in the Titanic after watching it sink to the bottom of the ocean.
The free-to-play shooter genre is one that is definitely oversaturated with few flashes in the pan that seem one and done after a couple months. Many try to to do their unique spin on things with Web3 or Crypto or some other twist (that almost always turns into a scam), but next to none have taken off in the post-Fortnite era and stuck around longer than a year or so, save for a few. Of course, those games have devoted fan bases and it shard to get any player that is a fan of the genre to invest time into two, tops.
And while XDefiant certainly has a few fans out there, the dozen or so that played the game and stuck around will no doubt feel gypped for their time and monetary investment. However, Ubisoft is looking to refund certain players for those bigger heft “founder” pack purchases. You can read more about that here.
