XDefiant is shutting, Ubisoft has confirmed. The first-person shooter space is pretty massive and one of the most popular genres in gaming. However, it is dominated by a core group of franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield. There are some other titles that have managed to break in over the last decade such as Valorant, but it is a really hard genre to find a massive audience for over the course of many years given games like Call of Duty have such a strong stranglehold over players. Ubisoft launched a brand new FPS game called XDefiant earlier this year after spending quite some time doing player tests.
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XDefiant was aiming to be a direct rival to Call of Duty and was even being led by former Call of Duty producer Mark Rubin. Unfortunately, XDefiant didn’t even last a year and really began to struggle when it had to go up against Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. After months of rumors about XDefiant possibly being shut down, Ubisoft has officially confirmed that players can no longer download the game starting to day and that servers will be shut off in June 2025. Mark Rubin confirmed the news on Twitter and noted that the studio still plans to finish releasing content as part of the game’s third season, but after that, there will be no more updates to the game.
Those who purchased XDefiant’s Ultimate Founders Pack will receive a full refund and those who made any in-game purchases in the last 30 days will be refunded as well. Those refunds will be issued sometime within the next 8 weeks. In addition to this, Ubisoft San Francisco and Osaka are being closed down with up to 177 people being laid off. Half of XDefiant‘s team will be moved to other projects, according to Stephen Totilo. Totilo also reported that the reason for XDefiant‘s abrupt discontinuation was due to declining player numbers.
With all of that said, it’s a major blow to Ubisoft. XDefiant was not only intended to be a direct rival to Call of Duty, but a major player for Ubisoft’s live service efforts in addition to the long-running Rainbow Six Siege which is entering its tenth year. It’s disappointing to see this happen, but hardly surprising after months of struggles with the game. It likely didn’t help that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the most accessible Call of Duty to date with its availability on Xbox Game Pass. Rumors of XDefiant being killed off were shut down by Ubisoft in September, but it’s possible that this was indeed being considered for a while and officially decided recently. XDefiant was criticized by some players at launch for feeling a bit rushed, possibly to beat this year’s Call of Duty to release and give itself some lead time in the shooter space.