Ubisoft is shutting down its free-to-play cross-platform shooter XDefiant. Starting December 3, new downloads and player registrations will be shut down. That said, servers will be active until June 3, 2025. All of the game’s season three content will also be released soon, but the exact date has yet to be decided.
Players who bought the Ultimate Founder’s pack and anyone else who made any purchase in the game within the last 30 days of the announcement will receive a full refund. The refunds should happen automatically within eight weeks.
XDefiant broke Ubisoft’s internal records for the fastest game, surpassing five million players. By the announcement, Mark Rubin, executive producer of the game, claimed it had over 15 million players. Those are good numbers, especially considering just how saturated the free-to-play shooter market is and XDefiant’s take on the game, which removed skill-based matchmaking to bring a more “old-school” arcade shooter experience.
The game did get off to a strong start, with over a million players in its closed beta. Despite its delayed launch, it quickly amassed a player base of around 10 million players in just two weeks. However, it failed to hold on to this initial momentum, and the player count has been dwindling since its May 2024 launch.
Rubin’s announcement post doesn’t quite explain why the game is being discontinued. However, it does state that Ubisoft and the teams working on the game were prepared to make the long journey that most free-to-play games to find their footing until very recently. “But unfortunately, the journey became too much to sensibly continue.”
This isn’t a problem only affecting XDefiant, either. It has affected other games, most notably Concorde—a very expensive failure at Sony’s hands. Spectre Divide, another game that initially gained a lot of hype and had esports professional Shroud as a consultant, is also suffering from the same problem: players flood the game upon launch but refuse to return as time goes on.
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