Ubisoft 2024 release to shut down after just 1 year

Even though it’s less than seven months old, Ubisoft has announced that they’re permanently shutting down their latest free-to-play FPS in exactly six months time.

XDefiant had, by all accounts, a relatively successful launch. Although the game had a few server issues in its first 24 hours, it was reported that it managed to amass over one million players on its first day.

Then, roughly a month after it released, Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot announced that the game had garnered over 11 million unique players.

Most publishers would kill for player numbers like this. Yet, clearly Ubisoft has decided that XDefiant is (somehow) not profitable enough to keep around, as the official @PlayXDefiant Twitter account announced that the game will be shutting its doors next year.

“Thank you for your incredible support and dedication to XDEFIANT,” reads the statement, We regret to inform you that we are initiating the sunset process starting today, December 3, 2024.”

“As a result, new downloads, player registrations and purchases will no longer be available. Season 3 will still launch. The servers will remain active, and the game will be fully playable until June 3rd, 2025.”

Take a look at XDefiant in action below.

Worse still, in a separate post on Ubisoft’s website, Marie-Sophie de Waubert (Ubisoft’s chief studios and portfolio officer) revealed that the decision to shut down the title would also result in 277 people losing their jobs.

As de Waubert explained, XDefiant going offline means that Ubisoft will be closing their “San Francisco and Osaka production studios” and ramping down their ”Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney.”

So, how did we get here? The game was successful (at least at one point in time) and the executive producer Mark Rubin stated that there were “NO plans to shut down” XDefiant back in October.

Well, while XDefiant got off to a great start, player numbers dwindled pretty quickly. Back in August, Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson reported that sources close to Ubisoft stated that XDefiant had less than “20,000 concurrent players across all its platforms.”

One of Insider Gaming’s sources even stated that we should “expect more Ubisoft San Fran layoff headlines within six months” - which proved to be depressingly accurate.

Here’s hoping the folks affected find new work ASAP.