Ubisoft has announced that they are discontinuing their free-to-play shooter XDefiant, and last night began shutting down the game with a server shutdown in June 2025. This announcement comes just half a year after the launch of XDefiant, although Season 3 will do just that. still happens for those who stick around.
Update: Due to the closure Ubisoft lays off 277 people from their teams from San Francisco, Osaka and Sydney. About half of the global team could be redeployed to other projects, but these three studio locations in San Francisco and Osaka are closing, and Sydney is scaling back.
Here’s the timeline for the closing
- December 3, 2024 – XDefiant has been removed from digital stores, new player registrations have been blocked, and players can no longer purchase content.
- June 3, 2025 – XDefiant servers will go offline, but existing players will have full access to the game and all 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, before January 28, 2025 – see the FAQ for more details.
Executive producer Mark Rubin provided the following message:
I am of course heartbroken that I have to write this post. Yes, this game has been a personal passion for me for years and yes, I know not all challenges lead to victory, but I also want to recognize all the developers affected by this shutdown. Each and every one of them is a real person with a real life separate from ours, and they each put so much of their own passion into making this game. And I hope they can be proud of what they have achieved. I know I will always be proud and grateful that I had the opportunity to work with such an amazing team! A team that really punched above its weight class.
And what they have achieved is truly remarkable. The initial reaction from players when XDefiant launched was amazing: we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and eventually had over 15 million players playing our game! That’s something to be extremely proud of, especially considering how cool this genre is. So thank you to all the developers who put their passion into making this game!
If there’s one thing I hope we can all learn 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 on XDefiant, this was the vision I wanted to convey, and I hope it leaves a positive impression on the way the gaming industry interacts with its players and communities.
To our players: THANK YOU! From the bottom of my heart, I would like 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 six months after the game’s launch on May 21, with Ubisoft’s latest crack at a live service game that merges 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 largely depend on its future roadmap. Fortunately, Ubisoft is no stranger 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 quickly became clear that XDefiant would generate the kind of overwhelmingly positive buzz from critics and streamers, or build a community big enough to survive in the long run – yes, it had 5 million downloads at launch, but how many stick around? By August, the number of concurrent players had dropped below 20,000. Ubisoft repeatedly brushed aside questions about the game’s future in recent months, but clearly came to the conclusion that it was not sustainable.
Source: Ubisoft, Frequently asked questions