Dreadful news for XDefiant fans and Ubisoft workers tonight: The game is closing down permanently, and several hundred Ubisoft employees are being laid off.
Ubisoft made the announcement this evening: “Thank you for your incredible dedication and support of XDEFIANT. We regret to inform you that we are initiating the sunset process starting today, December 3rd, 2024. As a result, new downloads, player registrations and purchases will no longer be available. Season 3 will still launch, so stay tuned for more updates to come. The servers will remain active, and the game will be fully playable until June 3rd, 2025.”
Players who bought the Ultimate Founders Packs, DLC, and cash-shop coins will be refunded in an automatic process that could take as long as eight weeks.
XDefiant’s executive producer, Mark Rubin, suggested in a separate memo to players that development had stretched on too long. “Free-to-play, in particular, is a long journey,” he wrote. “Many free-to-play games take a long time to find their footing and become profitable. It’s a long journey that Ubisoft and the teams working on the game were prepared to make until very recently. But unfortunately, the journey became too much to sensibly continue.”
XDefiant’s closure isn’t exactly a surprise; this past September, Rubin penned a dev blog denying rumors that the game was dying and that Ubisoft had issued an ultimatum that it turn around its fortunes by November. Clearly, those rumors proved legit.
But the impact is much bigger than one game. Game File’s Stephen Totilo reports that Ubisoft is doing much more than just closing a game; apparently, it’s outright closing Ubisoft San Francisco’s production studio as well as Ubisoft Osaka, “ramping down” the Ubisoft team in Sydney, and laying off as many as 277 people total. Reportedly, a chunk of the XDefiant team will be retained and moved to other positions within the company.
These won’t be the first layoffs from Ubisoft in 2024; in fact, the company has been a bit of a trashfire all year, not only issuing multiple rounds of layoffs but trying to push gen AI junk and failed NFT/Web3 games, canceling a Division spinoff, killing off The Crew 1 so hard it sparked an international game preservation movement and proposed class action lawsuit, and botching its RTO mandates so badly that 700 workers went on strike for three days. And let us not forget that this year an Ubisoft exec suggested gamers needed to “get comfortable” not owning their own games. That’s just the stuff we covered, and we don’t even cover Ubisoft all that deeply.
