Ubisoft is shutting down XDefiant and closing three studios

Ubisoft has officially announced that it will be shutting down XDefiant, its free-to-play live-service shooter that was meant to compete with the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield. Ubisoft, which has sometimes struggled to retain player interest in the wide-spanning shooter genre, found major success with Rainbow Six Siege. Since then, however, it hasn’t really been able to recapture that same magic.

The publisher’s Division 2, a looter shooter, was popular and continues to get regular seasonal updates, but Ubisoft hasn’t confirmed what new DLC content will be like. Ubisoft also canceled The Division Heartland, which was supposed to be an upcoming survival shooter that was briefly available in a closed beta. XDefiant was Ubisoft’s next big game that the company was hoping would follow in the footsteps of Rainbow Six Siege.

It featured characters from major Ubisoft franchises including The Division, Splinter Cell, and Rainbow Six. Ubisoft also promised to make it a game that had some of the best gunplay in the genre. But it seems the game wasn’t able to reach the kind of success that Ubisoft was hoping for.

Ubisoft changed its mind about shutting down XDefiant

While Ubisoft initially remained committed to the game it seems that the company has now changed its mind about the game’s cancellation. As reported by Eurogamer, Ubisoft said a month and a half ago that it wasn’t planning to shut the game down. This was after reports came out that Ubisoft was going to cancel it.

Ubisoft obviously seems to have been doing damage control with those denials. In Ubisoft’s official post about the cancellation, it explains a little more in detail about the reasoning for this decision. According to Marie-Sophie de Waubert, Ubisoft’s Chief Studios and Portfolio Officer, “we’ve not been able to attract and retain enough players in the long run to compete at the level we aim for in the very demanding free-to-play FPS market.”

So there you have it. The game’s player retention was not meeting Ubisoft’s standards. In addition to shutting down the game, Ubisoft is also closing three studios related to its development. This includes its San Francisco, Osaka, and Sydney production studios. As part of these closures, about 277 employees will be losing their jobs across all three studios.

XDefiant will remain live until next Summer

The disappointing news of XDefiant’s closure followed by the firing of nearly 300 employees is nothing to celebrate. However, for fans of the game, there’s still quite a bit of time to continue playing it. Ubisoft has stated that XDefiant will remain live until June 3 2025 and that Season 3 is still launching.

It’s a bittersweet ending that seems to be all too common in the games industry these days. In terms of shooters, Ubisoft still has new content coming to Rainbow Six Siege. It also still seems to have development continuing on The Division Resurgence, the mobile adaption of its looter shooter. However, a release date is still TBD on this and there hasn’t been much said about it since last year’s beta test.