Ubisoft shuts down Free2Play shooter "Xdefiant" and closes developer studios

Ubisoft wanted to participate in the Free2Play scene with the online shooter "Xdefiant", but after only around half a year, the French publisher has already heralded the end. As of yesterday, the game can no longer be downloaded and the registration of new players has been closed. Xdefiant can still be played until June 3, 2025, when the servers will be shut down, but the end of Xdefiant will cost almost 300 employees from three different development studios their jobs.

Ubisoft announced the game in mid-2021 and it was officially released in May 2024. With Xdefiant, Ubisoft wanted to compete with Valorant and Overwatch, because similar to these two successful shooters from Riot Games and Blizzard, players compete against each other in teams of six characters. According to Ubisoft, the focus is on shooting with various firearms, and each character will also have special abilities typical of the genre.

Free2Play needs more players willing to pay

Games of this type are free to download and are financed via so-called microtransactions, for example when players want to upgrade their characters. So far, this has clearly not paid off for Ubisoft. "Despite an encouraging start, the passionate work of the team and a dedicated fan base, we have not been able to attract and retain enough players in the long term to compete at the level we are aiming for in the very demanding free-to-play FPS market," writes Ubisoft's studio head Marie-Sophie de Waubert.

"For this reason, the game is still too far from achieving the results required for further significant investment and we are announcing that we will be discontinuing it," she continued. Xdefiant was initially quite successful. It reached 5 million players more quickly than any other Ubisoft game and , according to Xdefiant producer Mark Rubin, recently had over 15 million players.

Almost 300 Xdefiant employees are leaving

With the end of Xdefiant, Ubisoft announced the closure of two development studios, in San Francisco, California, and Osaka, Japan. The development studio in Sydney, Australia, will also be cut. 143 employees in San Francisco and a total of 134 employees in Osaka and Sydney will have to go. That is more than half of all those who have worked on Xdefiant to date. The rest of the Xdefiant team will take on other tasks at Ubisoft.

Xdefiant players who bought the "Ultimate Founder's Pack" for 70 US dollars or other packs such as the "Gold Pack", the "Starter Pack" or the "Combat Pack" will automatically receive their money back. The prices of all purchases made within the last 30 days will also be refunded. According to Ubisoft, the money will be refunded within the next eight weeks. However, the purchase prices of other additional packs such as the "Founder's Pack" or the "Founder's Pack Elite" will not be refunded.

(fds)