Ubisoft’s Call of Duty competitor XDefiant will end in 2025

Ubisoft had high hopes for the free-to-play first person shooter XDefiant, which launched in May. But now the publisher has announced plans to phase out the game and close it completely in June 2025, according to a blog post from the publisher’s official website on Tuesday.

“Despite an encouraging start, the team’s passionate work and a dedicated fan base, we have not been able to attract and retain enough players in the long term to compete at the level we aim for in the highly demanding free -to-play-game. FPS market,” said Ubisoft Chief Studios and Portfolio Officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert in the blog post. “As a result, the game is too far away from achieving the results necessary to enable further significant investment, and we are announcing that we will end it.”

Effective immediately, XDefiant registration and downloads will no longer be available. Players who purchased the Ultimate Founder’s Pack or made any other in-game purchase within the last 30 days will automatically receive a full refund within the next eight weeks.

Season 3 content will still launch at a future date and the matchmaking servers will remain online until June 2, 2025.

With fast-paced gameplay combined with characters from popular Ubisoft games such as The Division, Splinter Cell and Watch Dogs, the publisher had hoped that XDefiant would compete with Call of Duty in the first-person shooter market.

XDefiant reached one million players within the first two and a half hours of launch in May 2024, and averaged 300,000 concurrent players within the first 48 hours it was available to play.

But more recent reports suggest that the concurrent players count dropped below 20,000 in Augustand Ubisoft fired ten XDefiant developers that same month.

In September, XDefiant’s executive producer Mark Rubin refuted rumors that the game was in danger of being discontinued. “I just want to quickly address the status of the game. That is, the game is dying. No, the game is definitely not dying,” Rubin said at the time.

The termination of XDefiant will result in more layoffs in an already fraught year for the games industry. In addition to the game’s shutdown, Ubisoft’s teams in San Francisco and Osaka will also be shut down, and its production site in Sydney will also be closed. A total of 277 staff are expected to be laid off.

Gaming companies have laid off a total of more than 13,000 employees in September 2024. In 2023, more than 11,000 employees in the gaming industry were laid off.