Ubisoft Shutting Down XDefiant Along With Two Studios

Ubisoft has been in the headlines for several reasons, but this time, not with Assassin's Creed Shadows. While 2024 has been an eventful year for the video game industry, many great games and some really bad ones have been released; what marks this year the most is the closure of several studio shutdowns along with their games. Now, new to this list is Ubisoft's free-to-play first-person shooter, XDefiant.

So, apparently, XDefiant somewhat follows the same fate as Concord from Sony, except that Concord was shut down 11 days after its release. Yesterday, Ubisoft announced that they will be shutting down XDefiant, a game that just launched in May 2024. This came as a surprise for those who already spent countless hours in the game. Especially because a Closed Beta version of XDefiant was released last year, and over a million players gave it rave reviews; nonetheless, it seems that Ubisoft was disappointed. Despite XDefiant's May 2024 release, Ubisoft has already said that they would no longer be developing or supporting the free-to-play team-based shooter.

So, new user registrations are no longer being accepted, and the servers will be permanently shut down in June 2025, except for the Ubi+ Subscriber, who will have access to Season 3 if they had registered for the game before December 3, 2024. What came as a surprise was Ubisoft was pleased with the game's release and even said that the game "outperformed expectations thanks to acquisition and strong average revenue per session day" after XDefiant's delayed launch, with over 10 million players playing in the first two weeks.

But XDefiant didn't see its brighter days like how it performed during the Closed Beta. There are now less than 20,000 active players; it seems the game was unable to maintain that number. According to Ubisoft's statement, anyone who signed up for XDefiant before December 3, 2024, will have access to the game until June 3, 2025, along with all features, including progression, events, rewards, and achievements. Even though the launch of Season 3 will still take place as scheduled, those who bought the Ultimate Founders Pack, VC, or DLC last month will be refunded.

What's more disheartening is that Ubisoft San Francisco and Osaka production studios behind XDefiant will also be shutting down, and obviously, there will be layoffs as a result of the shutdown. Ubisoft pointed out that the "difficult consequences" that result from this include the scaling down of their Sydney production site, with 143 employees in San Francisco and 134 employees likely to lose their jobs from Osaka and Sydney. This sort of shutdown has been a common incident late in the video game industry, but 2004 has been the worst of it so far with Sony Shuts Down Firewalk Studios & Neon Koi, and Xbox Shuts Down Four Studios.