If you had forgotten all about Ubisoft’s newish shooter XDefiant, then you’re not alone. It actually launched back in May and apparently did fine, or so people thought until an August report claimed Ubisoft wasn’t happy with the size of the playerbase and its ability to squeeze money from it. At the time, the implication was that the game had under 20K concurrent players (console and PC together) and that its devs were told they had until November to turn their fortunes around. That rumor had largely flown under the radar too.
But now, XDefiant executive producer Mark Rubin has a dev blog out that both denies one of the rumors (thereby shining a new spotlight right on them) and previews the game’s second season.
“I just want to quickly address the status of the game. i.e. is the game dying? No, the game is absolutely not dying,” he says. “We know there are things we need to improve like Netcode/Hitreg and adding more content to progression, but the game is doing well. We just want it to do better. And we do that by addressing the concerns of our community which has always been the plan. Ubisoft is very much behind us and has allocated more resources to the team in order for us to do that.”
In fact, Rubin has released a year-one roadmap that should take the game into at least a fourth season with its “biggest ever event.” The team took the wraps off S2 last night with multiple trailers too. So hey, maybe it’s OK, even if Rubin didn’t directly address all of the rumors. But we’re still kinda more worried than we were before.
