Whelp, post your surprised Pikachu .gifs, but Ubisoft is sunsetting XDefiant after denying for months they were shutting down the game. The game will be closed on June 2025. For those that already own a copy of the game, the previously announced Season 3 content will release for them, but new downloads and registrations are unavailable moving forward. While many might joke that they didn't even know the game existed or doubted that it would have staying power after Ubisoft put zero marketing into it, this shutdown will impact hundreds of people at Ubisoft. As reported by Stephen Totilo, the sunsetting of XDefiant is expected to result in the firing of approximately 277 employees, initiate the shutdown of Ubisoft SF and Ubisoft Osaka, and relocate non-impacted employees to other projects and teams. Insider Gaming is reporting that only a skeleton crew is still working on the game to make sure the servers remain running until the game's official closure. In light of the relocation of the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown team to other teams and projects, this is bound to add fuel to the rumors that Ubisoft may be imminently approaching a sale to another suitor, because it honestly feels like the entire company's future is pegged on the success of Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Also, I think we all depressingly saw this coming. As mentioned earlier, Ubisoft put zero marketing into XDefiant and the game's online community collapsed within weeks. Ubisoft also was entering an incredibly crowded field and it seemed fruitless from the get-go. As someone that gave the game a shot, it also seemed like an amazing case study on why skill-based matchmaking is good, actually, because the few people that started playing the game remained committed and made it absolutely miserable for newcomers.

But, what do you all make of the news and how screwed do you think Ubisoft is at this point?

I'm sad for the people losing their jobs of course, but we saw this coming from a mile away. Even at release people were asking why XDefiant existed at all. The game did nothing to set itself apart from the various competitors.

It's also not surprising that Ubisoft is starting to close down some of their giant armada of studios between those being shuttered for this and from Prince of Persia. Ubisoft have so many studios and for the number of games they actually release, it seems completely unsustainable. But then, everything about Ubisoft seems unsustainable. The AC games along with most of their other open world games keep getting bigger and more detailed, making them cost more and more money to produce, putting more pressure on them to hit lofty sales targets. It just seems like they're destined for failure if they keep going with this model.

Also yeah, skill-based matchmaking is essential for competitive multiplayer games to function. Anyone who says otherwise just wants to stroke their ego by beating up on new players or has never played a game without it before. It's not fun for anyone. Heck, the Call of Duty people even did a paper on how they tested removing skill-based matchmaking for a subset of players and found it made people not play the game as much and caused people to have a lot less fun.

I don't mean this to sound at all crass towards the employees affected by this but man, I had no idea this even came out. I get that I'm not as connected to the games world as I was five or six years ago but it's baffling to me how bad some of the PR work has been for big games lately, like just being attached to a major publisher is supposed to be enough.

It's not just you. The game was barely covered and outside of a couple small announcements, was barely marketed. I think Gerstmann streamed it for like an hour and that was kinda it. None of the other outlets or people I follow talked about it much. Most of the talk pre-release was about how the unranked matchmaking was location-based rather than skill, which likely led to anyone new being dumpstered by someone who's really good at shooters who is specifically queuing up in unranked to do so.

The short-sightedness of these mega companies will never cease to amaze me. It's not just making XDefiant in the first place, let alone releasing it with that horrible name, let alone failing to market it, it's also the lying about the state of the game and their plans for it.

Does Ubisoft not realize that this will make people less likely to trust them on live service games going forward? They shut down The Crew, they shut down XDefiant, the more these games shut down the harder it is to bring people back, and lying about it means that you have no credible way to assuage people's fears.

I feel bad for the people who got laid off, many of whom were given no warning, but at this point Ubisoft is being run like a company that wants to go out of business. Apparently its live service and legacy revenue is keeping it afloat for now, but it needs some hits and it needs much better management.

It's a real shame because they have great IP and they used to make some great and even innovative games. We all joked about the formula when it became clear that's what it was, but it really has strangled the company, and its attempts to diversify seem half-baked at best.

Meanwhile projects like the Sands of Time remake and Beyond Good and Evil 2 take so long to develop that we've all forgotten about them.

How badly is this company run? What percentage of time do Ubisoft execs spend on sexual harassment and general abuse vs actual management? It's gotta be like 80-20 when you count covering up harassment and abuse.

I remember installing Xdefiant, playing for two hours, uninstalling and saying to my housemate "This game will be pulled within 6 months".

It was so utterly samey it beggars belief. No risks taken whatsoever and no improvements over any modern shooters. Absolutely nothing to hang their hat on. Just the most average, by numbers COD copy they could come up with.

Ubisoft have no idea what they are doing.

Classic three lane COD with Ubisoft heroes didn't seem like a very compelling pitch that only a small vocal minority were ever asking for. Given the multiple closed and open beta's over the year the game didn't get any sort of traction.

What is there even left to say about Ubisoft leadership's mismanagement of the company? Their problems with any given game are endemic to the industry right now, but I can't think of anyone else that bungles *every last* decision the way they do. I'm pretty convinced that AC Shadows is the game that gets buried the most in that February 2025 gauntlet.

Sucks so much to see hundreds of layoffs, especially those in the country that's going to get even more hostile to workers and the unemployed soon.

Of all the games being released in that time window, AC Shadows is looking the weakest so far. I hope I'm wrong and it does well but it seems like it's being sent to die by being released in that month. Monster Hunter alone is gonna be huge and will likely eat up a lot of the air in press coverage since all of the previews have been so positive and that series has grown in popularity the last few years.

Again, I hope I'm wrong but it just seems like such a bad choice to release AC that month. I know it's related to fiscal quarters and stuff but at the same time, it feels like they're voluntarily Horizoning themselves by doing this.

Lasted longer than Hyperscape....

Man, I know the big publishers are “risk averse” as of late, so they don’t want to try new ideas and would rather copy an established genre with an audience.

But you know what might be the biggest risk of all? Spending tens of millions of dollars on an also-ran multiplayer game that isn’t absolutely top of its class in execution or leaning extremely heavily on established IP. Maybe they should expand their scope of the word “risk” to include “making a bog-standard game in a saturated genre where you’ll never get noticed.”

Whether it’s Hyperscape or Concord or XDefiant, it just seems like a bad idea to jump into the GaaS multiplayer shooter space, since to compete with the big guys it can’t look or feel cheap, so you have to dump a ton of resources into development just so it even approaches the polish people expect from modern shooters. So you have a huge budgetary buy-in, but if your dev teams aren’t pitching you absolutely world class eye-catching original ideas, why spend all that money? It’ll never get anyone’s attention, the playerbase will be DOA, and everyone will keep on playing CoD/Valorant/Counterstrike/Fortnite/R6 Siege/PUBG/Apex. You can’t just win by attrition, where each year you make a shooter or two, and as other games age out maybe your game that year is the new hotness. The old games don’t age out, in many genres you’re now going up against the forever games, and you’re just giving some poor studio false hope that their middling 6-7 out of 10 game has any chance, and then when the game brings in *shocker* no revenue, the studio staff gets laid off.

Maybe all these publishers somehow believe these cancelled multiplayer shooters were going to be their big breakout hit, Helldivers-style, but c’mon, there has to be somebody in these meeting rooms to point out when a game is just unremarkable and there’s no way the marketing will find an audience for it.

Ubisoft has had one of the worst years for a gaming developer. And I fear Assassin's Creed Shadows won't change their fortunes. The lesson here is that the live service market is sowed up, and trying to add a new game to the mix is like playing the lottery. The reason The First Descendant is hanging in there, is because the developers have fully shifted into making a fan service shooter with the female characters and their revealing outfits and boob and ass designs.

@av_gamer:

So Ubisoft still has a chance with a XXXDefiant re-launch...

It was pretty obvious that XDefiant would be shut down, it was just a matter of time. Honestly, I'm not surprised at all

@bisonhero: One thing that helps explain this phenomenon is the difference between corporate risk aversion and personal risk aversion.

Is it risky for Ubisoft the company to make an F2P bog standard shooter in a saturated marketplace? Yes.

Is it risky for an executive to greenlight such a game? Probably not. There's a very easy explanation as to why you did it, investors see dollar signs in their eyes when they think you might challenge COD, and it's easy to blame the market or the team or whoever after the fact.

If you greenlight and shepherd a unique project and it fails then people put the blame on you. If you do it with a very established "safe" project then it's easy to cast it elsewhere.

Look at Nintendo. They try weird stuff all the time and it does work out overall because they have a lot of huge hits but they also have massive flops like the Wii U or ARMS. However that company's culture promotes creativity and risk taking so they keep doing while none of the big Western publishers (including Sony, which is a Japanese company but runs the PS division out of Europe) do.

I'm not making a cultural essentialist point here, there are also Japanese companies that play it safe and smaller Western companies that take risks, but I do think the corporate and investment culture of Japan vs those of the US and many European countries does play a role.

This doesn't really have much of anything to do with their recent woes, but since people are talking about Ubisoft I thought I might as well share a frustrating experience I had with them tonight.

I just got a new top-of-the-line PC (4090 with Ryzen 7 9800X3D), and had bought some games during the recent Steam sale that could take advantage of it. One was Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which I got for $6. I had never bought or played a Ubisoft game on PC, I'd always bought them on console before this. Besides that, I am not a big Ubi guy anyway. I believe the last game of theirs I played may have been AC Origins, back around when it came out.

So I didn't immediately know what was wrong when I tried to launch the game and I just got nothing. No error messages or anything, I would just hit "Play," it would look like the game was launching, and then it would just stop. Then I figured out I needed to also be running Ubisoft Connect. Sigh. That was already annoying, but more so was that I didn't even remember if I had an active Ubi account or not. I created one with my current email address, tried starting the game again, and it threw an error, something about it being the wrong account. Huh?

Turns out that I had linked my Ubi account to my Sony account years ago, and my Sony account to my Steam account, so I guess Ubi's app expected me to be signed in to my old Ubisoft account that I didn't even really remember I had... and it was associated with an email account that I haven't had access to for about a decade, to the best of my recollection.

I managed to sign in to the Ubi account via browser by signing in using my Sony credentials, but for the actual Ubisoft Connect app I then had to actually try to remember the password I'd used. Funnily enough, even though now Ubi requires passwords to have an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, number, and special character, when I figured out what that old password was, it only had numbers and lowercase letters... I'd created it way back when the password requirements were less strict.

After I got the game running, I tried to change my email address, but of course it wants to send a verification code to the old one that I can't access anymore. I guess I could contact support to try to have it changed, but... why, I guess? At least this way I cannot, by definition, receive any of their marketing emails!

Anyway, holy hell, I should not have had to jump through those hoops just to play a game I'd paid for, however discounted it may have been. I was close to refunding the game rather than dealing with the third-party app BS. I don't think they're doing themselves any favors that way.

@atheistpreacher: This doesn't really have much of anything to do with their recent woes

Strong disagree. Their anti-consumer policies have a lot to do with their current woes. They've turned their customer base against them, which makes it much harder to get people to buy Ubisoft products, especially at full price.

Having a bad corporate reputation does actually matter.

@atheistpreacher:

Your story reminds me a lot of what I had to go through with Call of Duty Modern Warfare III earlier this year, when I tried to play it after it came to Game Pass. I went through pretty much the same nonsense with Activision. Long story short, it turns out there is an Activision website and a Call of Duty website. I tried to change my password on the Activision site, because that's what the game says to do when you first start it up, and I was trying to link my PS account with the PC one. Since I mostly play COD on the consoles in the past. But it turns out, you need to change your password on the Call of Duty site, if you have an Activision account, and you're playing COD. If not for someone making a Youtube video pointing this out, I would've never known, and I'd be screwed.

@bigsocrates: Oh, sure, I agree with that. I was really just saying that this is a thread primarily about XDefiant and my story was about trying to play a six-year-old game.

Oh, also, for extra fun, I got a marketing email from Ubi this morning for the new account that I'd closed less than an hour after creating it, but it takes 30 days for them to delete from their system, and meanwhile I can't log in to that account anymore to tell them to stop, or even email support about it. Joy.