When Ubisoft wasn’t releasing Assassin’s Creed for the umpteenth time or hitting Ctrl + C on the last Far Cry map, it was busying itself with one the best free arcade first-person shooters of the decade. That’s XDefiant, if you happened to miss the release which only happened in May of this year. It’s not worth visiting the game now since Ubisoft just confirmed that the game will be sunset in 2025.
That’s despite the title’s massive launch, which was the fastest of Ubisoft’s to hit five million players, and managed to garner 15 million players now that all has been said and done – a figure that doesn’t quite tally up with the game’s demise. Starting today (3 December), new players cannot download the game and get right in – killing any chance of it finding a new life before its tragic end.
We miss the new Ubisoft
Players who have already invested time (and possibly even money) into XDefiant, however, can continue mushroom-stomping the already dwindling player base. The servers will remain live until 3 June 2025, after which Ubisoft will hit the big red button and say goodbye forever. Ubisoft can’t get you back those hours spent in the game, but it can refund your money – which it will do over the coming weeks.
Anybody who purchased the absurdly expensive $70 XDefiant Ultimate Founders Pack will receive a full refund, while those who spent a whole lot less in the last 30 days will also be fully refunded. That means those guys who purchased the game’s first battle pass will have to wave goodbye to their funds forever. If you’re one of the few awaiting a refund, expect it to turn up in your bank account sometime in the next eight weeks.
The game’s closure doesn’t just mean we’ll have to direct our FPS energy elsewhere. It means that Ubisoft’s team members who built this great game are in for some “difficult consequences”… like the closure of two studios and a high number of layoffs.
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“Even if almost half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft, this decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney,” the company said in a blog post.
It’s easy to talk about the things that Ubisoft did wrong in light of the game’s unfortunate end, but not enough to speak about what Ubisoft got right here. Removing SBBM (skill-based matchmaking) was certainly a… decision, especially considering it was going up against a behemoth like Call of Duty. That choice wasn’t appreciated enough by the swarm of kids begging their parents to buy Activision’s latest plaything.
Being free-to-play was another bold move that goes directly against Ubisoft’s ideology, made better by its focus on purely cosmetic microtransactions Sure, Ubisoft didn’t have the best time with its netcode issues and a release on Steam would surely have been a boon before the hasty closure, but hindsight is 20/20, and we appreciate the effort all the same. Goodbye XDefiant, you’ll be missed.
