Ubisoft's horror year continues with XDefiant shutdown
By Brian Allen
The official X account for XDefiant confirmed one of the worst-kept secrets in gaming yesterday when it announced that the first-person arena shooter will sunset. The process is starting immediately. Here's the official word per X:
Dear Players,
Important message: XDEFIANT IS SUNSETTING!
Thank you for your incredible support and dedication to XDEFIANT. We regret to inform you that we are initiating the sunset process starting today, December 3, 2024.
As a result, new downloads, player registrations, and purchases will no longer be available.
Season 3 will still launch. The servers will remain active, and the game will be fully playable until June 3rd, 2025.
For those who purchased the Ultimate Founders Pack, you will receive a full refund. Players who made any purchases within the last 30 days will also be fully refunded.
Please note that processing these refunds will take up to 8 weeks. For more details on refunds, please visit http://XDefiant.com.
After multiple delays, the game launched in May and initially did blockbuster numbers. It was one of Ubisoft's fastest games to reach 5 million players and more than 15 million people played during its run. But those numbers fell off fast and with Ubisoft already in the throes of a difficult year, rumors that XDefiant was on borrowed time never subsided.
In his post explaining the sunset, Executive Producer Mark Rubin talked about the dangers all free-to-play games face.
"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," he said. "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."
I played in one of the betas and played quite a bit at launch. I had a great deal of fun, and I love the shared shooter universe concept. I was really looking forward to seeing what they would do with the Assassin's Creed-themed season.
But the writing was on the wall as Ubisoft bleeds money from the big budget disappointments of Star Wars Outlaws, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and the delay of Assassin's Creed Shadows. Rumors that a game is shutting down don't do much to inspire players to join its servers. RIP, XDefiant.