Let’s get the obvious out of the way: XDefiant is one of the worst names for a videogame you’ll ever see. Yet underneath the identikit theme and terrible name, XDefiant turned out to be a pretty decent shooter, and following last year’s release PCG’s Jake Tucker called it “the perfect antidote to those tired of Call of Duty’s modern-day bloat”.
Despite a strong start, however, player numbers soon fell off, and by the end of 2024 Ubisoft had announced its intention to close down XDefiant by June this year. This was shortly afterwards followed by a real oddity: a massive content drop of everything the devs had been working on. Turned out that a game players had criticised for lacking content actually had a tonne of content more-or-less ready to go.
It was too little too late, however, and XDefiant is now gone for good. Yes it does seem slightly bananas that a Ubisoft game which only released last year is now just gone forever, but I guess that’s the videogames industry for you.
XDefiant executive producer Mark Rubin stayed with the game until the bitter end, and has now announced his own departure from Ubisoft and retirement from the games industry (thanks, GIBiz).
“It’s a sad day for fans of XDefiant and for all of the passionate devs that worked so hard on this game,” says Rubin on X. “Something remarkable happened with this game in that, although we had very little marketing, we still had the fastest acquisition of players in the first few weeks for a Ubisoft title just from you guys all talking about and promoting the game.”
After that launch period, unfortunately, “we weren’t acquiring new players”. Rubin goes on to list some of the issues the game faced.
“For one we had crippling tech debt using an engine that wasn’t designed for what we were doing, and we didn’t have the engineering resources to ever correct that,” says Rubin. “I do personally think that in-house engines are not the valuable investment that they used to be and they are often doomed to fall behind big engines like Unreal. This tech debt included the dreaded netcode issues that we could just not solve given the architecture we were dealing with.”
This was a major issue for XDefiant since launch, and never really went away. And it’s linked to the fact that the team didn’t have “the right resources to make content for the game. What we saw at Season 3 wasn’t even enough content in my mind for launch. There were some really cool features coming later in Season 4 or even 5 that would have completed the game in a way that I felt it should have been for launch… we just didn’t have the gas to go the distance for a free-to-play game.”
Rubin still thinks the team produced “a really fun and terrific game” with “some of the best maps ever made for an arcade shooter”. And he reckons that, even though it’s gone, XDefiant made an impact on other shooters: “We saw a lot of reactions from other games to what we were doing and that to me speaks volumes.”
At the time XDefiant’s closure was announced, Ubisoft also confirmed it meant hundreds of layoffs.
“The team behind XDefiant was all let go at the end of last year and I know many people have moved on to other studios, which is great, and I hope that for all of those still looking, that they find something quickly,” says Rubin.
“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.”
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