Ubisoft is shutting down XDefiant and killing the studio behind it

Ubisoft has decided to shut down XDefiant, its free-to-play first-person shooter, due to the game's inability to attract and retain enough players in the highly competitive free-to-play FPS market. Despite an encouraging start, XDefiant struggled to compete with other popular live service shooters like Fortnite and Call of Duty.

As a result, Ubisoft has announced that new downloads, player registrations, and purchases for XDefiant will no longer be available starting December 3, 2024. However, the game's servers will remain active until June 3, 2025, allowing existing players to continue enjoying the game. The developers also plan to release the game's planned Season 3 content.

The closure of XDefiant has also led to the shutdown of Ubisoft's San Francisco and Osaka studios, leading to a large number of layoffs. This news comes just months after the game's director insisted that the team had the ‘full support' of Ubisoft bosses to continue improving the game.

While XDefiant got off to a promising start, reaching 15 million players, technical issues, including poor netcode and hit detection, led to many players dropping the game for more polished alternatives on the market. As of August 2024, the game was estimated to have dropped below 20,000 concurrent players at peak times.

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KitGuru Says: So far, Ubisoft has missed on every single one of its live service attempts. Many projects have been cancelled, while others were released just to be embarrassingly shut down later. At this point, I think it is time for Yves Guillemot to just throw in the towel and find new leadership interested in delivering the types of games fans actually want to see from them.

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