Regardless of solely formally launching the sport in spring of this 12 months, Ubisoft has already announced that it’s ending improvement and sunsetting its free-to-play team-based shooter XDefiant. Like Hyper Scape earlier than it, XDefiant had excessive expectations, with Ubisoft touting greater than 1 million gamers in its closed beta final 12 months. Now, it’ll disappear shortly, because it’s now not accepting new gamers as of at present and is scheduled to shut off the servers completely subsequent June.
Regardless of a delayed launch, Ubisoft stated that XDefiant had reached greater than 10 million gamers in its first two weeks and “outperformed expectations due to acquisition and robust common income per session day.” Nevertheless, it couldn’t keep that momentum, and by this fall, rumors of bother surfaced, with Insider Gaming reporting that concurrent participant numbers throughout all platforms had fallen under 20,000.
Ubisoft states, “The sport will stay obtainable to all gamers who joined XDefiant earlier than December third, 2024. All functionalities, together with development, occasions, rewards, and achievements, will proceed to be obtainable till June third, 2025.” The deliberate Season 3 content material will nonetheless launch, and the corporate is refunding anybody who purchased the Final Founders Pack, in addition to gamers who purchased VC and DLC within the final month.
Like with Concord developer Firewalk Studios, this shutdown comes with job losses. In response to Ubisoft, “tough penalties” are resulting in “the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka manufacturing studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney manufacturing website, with 143 individuals departing in San Francisco and 134 individuals more likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney.”
