Ubisoft has announced that they are shutting down their free-to-play shooter XDefiant, starting the process of sunsetting the game last night with a server shutdown coming in June 2025. This announcement comes just half a year after XDefiant’s launch, though Season 3 will still happen for those who stick around.
Update: As a consequence of the shutdown, Ubisoft is laying off 277 people from their San Francisco, Osaka and Sydney teams. Around half of the global team is able to be moved on to other projects, but these three studio locations are being closed in San Francisco and Osaka, and Sydney is scaling back.
Here’s the timeline for the shutdown
- 3rd December 2024 – XDefiant delisted from digital stores, new player registrations are blocked, and players can no longer purchase any content.
- 3rd June 2025 – XDefiant servers will go offline, but existing players will have full access to the game and any upcoming content until this date.
Players who purchased the Ultimate Founder’s Pack will receive a full refund, and any purchases made within the last 30 days will also be fully refunded. This will happen within the next 8 weeks by 28th January 2025 – see the FAQ for more details.
Executive Producer Mark Rubin gave the following message:
I am, of course, heartbroken to have to be writing this post. Yes, this game has been a personal passion for me for years and yes, I know that not all challenges lead to victory, but I also want to recognize all of the developers who are being affected by this closure. Each and every one of them is a real person with a real life separate from our own and they have all put so much of their own passion into making this game. And I hope that they can be proud of what they did achieve. I know that I will always be proud and grateful to have worked with such a great team! A team that really punched above its weight class.
And what they achieved is truly remarkable. The early response from players when XDefiant launched was amazing—we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game! That is something to be extremely proud of, especially considering how tough this genre is. So, thank you to all of the developers who put their passion into making this game!
If there’s one thing, I hope we can all take away from this experience, it’s the importance of open, honest communication between developers and players. This “player-first” mentality along with respectful, non-toxic conversations between developers and players has been one of the standout differences that made XDefiant so special. From my very first post about XDefiant, this was the vision I wanted to champion, and I hope it leaves a positive mark on how the game industry treats its players and communities.
To our players, THANK YOU! From the bottom of my heart, I want to express my deepest gratitude for the incredible community that has grown around XDefiant. Your passion, creativity, and dedication have inspired us every step of the way.
The announcement comes just half a year after the game’s launch on 21st May, with Ubisoft’s latest crack at a live service game mashing together all their Tom Clancy franchises into an arcade-y first person shooter. At the time we said, “Exactly how much stopping power XDefiant gains will depend largely on its future roadmap. Thankfully, Ubisoft is no stranger when it comes to running a successful live service, with Rainbow Six Siege making a dramatic turnaround in its first year to become one of the biggest FPS games of all time.”
Unfortunately for the Ubisoft San Francisco team, it soon became clear that XDefiant strike the kind of overwhelmingly positive buzz from critics and streamers, or gain a large enough community to survive the long haul – yes, it had 5 million downloads at launch, but how many stuck around? By August, concurrent player counts were down to below 20,000. Ubisoft repeatedly waved away questions over the game’s future in the last few months, but clearly reached the conclusion that it wasn’t sustainable.
