After a successful launch in May of this year, Ubisoft’s free-to-play shooterXDefiantwill shut down, and the servers will go offline in June 2025.
This was announced on Twitter/X by Ubisoft San Francisco’s Mark Rubin, who shared the heartbreaking message with a comment on how hard it is to navigate the free-to-play seas.
XDefiant New Downloads No Longer Possible As Shooter Is Shutting Down
As part of the XDefiant shutdown announcement, Rubin also announced that players who bought the Ultimate Founder’s Pack and those who bought anything within the last 30 days will receive a full refund. Players won’t need to do anything, as the refunds will be made automatically and should be completed within eight weeks from today.
Rubin also commented on how hard it is to find a proper footing in the free-to-play market, stating, “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.”
While we don’t know how many players are still actively playing the game, Rubin shared that XDefiant broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass five million users. Ultimately, over 15 million gamers played the game, which is no small feat.
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The shutdown announcement came aftera report surfaced in Augustthat the game was in danger due to its declining player count across all platforms. While the report mentions that Ubisoft would shut the game down after Season 4 if things don’t turn around, it seems the game won’t even reach that, as Season 3 will be the final season for the game.
As someone who played the game often during its first few months, I hoped the missing features would eventually be added and the kinks ironed out. Sadly, that didn’t happen, and the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 surely didn’t help, given that both games target the same demographic. Ubisoft had something special with XDefiant, but it lacked a proper progression system after the initial unlocks, it was missing features that multiplayer games these days have out of the gate, and there were a considerable number of bugs that annoyed gamers.
Of course, it was unfair to compare XDefiant to a super big-budget game like Call of Duty, given the XDefiant dev team was considerably smaller, but I’d wager that most players didn’t know about that, nor would they care.
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Hopefully, Ubisoft will learn from this for their future free-to-play offerings. The company itself is having issues of its own, as the latest rumor mentions how Ubisoft isallegedly in talks with Chinese tech giant Tencentto acquire the company.
XDefiant is a first-person shooter created by Ubisoft that features several factions from other Ubisoft titles, such as Far Cry, The Division, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, and Watch Dogs.
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