XDefiant

» see xdefiant.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

XDefiant was alive for twelve months and thirteen days. I was forty when it launched, in Ankara, and I have never in my life installed a free-to-play shooter, so this grave is written entirely from the outside. It is worth writing anyway, because of what the publisher did to its own studios on the way out the door.

Ubisoft announced it in july 2021 as Tom Clancy's XDefiant. In march 2022 the Tom Clancy name came off and the premise was rebuilt around the company's own back catalog instead. The factions you chose between were lifted out of Far Cry and Ghost Recon, then given abilities they had never had in their own games. The maps were small and the mode list was the one every arena shooter ships with. It ran on Snowdrop, the engine Ubisoft had built for The Division.

It launched on 21 may 2024 on Windows and both current consoles, free to install with no entry fee of any kind. A million unique players signed in during the first two and a half hours. By the end of june the number was eleven million. For a company that had spent three years being told nobody wanted another live-service shooter, that opening week read like proof.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

The whole marketing position rested on one complaint. Call of Duty had spent years tightening skill-based matchmaking so that every player ended up in lobbies calibrated to keep them at roughly a fifty percent win rate, and a large, loud part of that audience hated it. They wanted the old arrangement back, where you got put in a room with whoever was awake and some nights you were the best player there.

XDefiant shipped without skill-based matchmaking in its core playlists and put that in the advertising. It is a strange thing to build a product around, an absence. But it was a real grievance with a real constituency, and it got eleven million people to download something in five weeks.

~ the fall ~

The trouble was that the people who arrived on a grievance left on the ordinary things. Netcode complaints, then a content cadence that kept slipping its own season dates. By august 2024 the reported concurrent player count had fallen under twenty thousand, which for a free game that had claimed eleven million registrations is close to a rounding error.

In october 2024 the executive producer, Mark Rubin, went on social media to tell people the game was not closing. He was answering rumors that were already circulating and he answered them plainly. Seven weeks later Ubisoft closed it. There is no reason to think he was lying, which is the more depressing reading: the person running the game did not know either.

~ what it cost ~

The announcement came on 3 december 2024, and it was not only a game shutting down. Ubisoft San Francisco, the studio that made it, was closed, and so was Osaka. The Sydney production site was wound down alongside them. A hundred and forty three people went from San Francisco and roughly a hundred and thirty four more from the other two sites, two hundred and seventy seven in total, against a game that had been on sale for six months.

The stated reason was that XDefiant "did not retain a large enough player base to establish it as a viable competitor in the free-to-play first-person-shooter genre". That sentence is true and it is also an admission about the shape of the market. There is no middle rung in free-to-play shooters. You are one of the three or four games people keep installed, or you are a studio being closed. Ubisoft found out which one it had built about two months after launch, and spent another year running the servers anyway, until 3 june 2025.

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