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XDefiant
GRTV News - XDefiant is closing down in June
Ubisoft's arena shooter has begun its sunsetting phase, which will conclude in the summer.
Audio transcription
"Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of GRTV News, today we're talking about a pretty sad announcement, but also an announcement that I personally am not too surprised about, and that is that X-Defiant is already set to be closed down."
"This game launched back in May 2024, after taking a long time to get through the development process, it was delayed a bunch of different times, went through a bunch of different play tests and what not, and eventually launched in May 2024.
Debuted as a game that I personally thought was technically and structurally, if you boil it down to its most core elements, a pretty competent and solid base, but it just lacked so much content that I personally thought that it wasn't, unless it was going to do something major in the seasons, it wasn't going to survive because people were just simply not going to stick around for it."
"And then the season, they announced that the season 1, the first season would come sort of 40 days or whatever after the game launched, that there'd be a pre-season that didn't offer anything for 4 or 5 weeks or whatever, and season 1 launched and it wasn't much different, and yeah, the signs all kept coming together to make it seem like this game was not going to be able to retain players and therefore didn't have a great future."
"And well, we're in December now, a few reports started doing the rounds yesterday, and now it's been confirmed, and yes, X-Defiant will be shut down in the summer of 2025, so let's dive in and have a look.
So yeah, confirmed, X-Defiant will be closed down in June 2025, Ubisoft has failed to convince players it's worth to give X-Defiant a new shot, and this is how leading to a tragic conclusion."
"Now this is an updated story, because obviously these are the reports at the bottom here from Insider Gaming that said that this is happening, but what we're going to do is we're going to focus on this bit here because this is the official announcement from Ubisoft, so update."
"Ubisoft has now confirmed that X-Defiant is set to be shut down with the initial sunsetting phase beginning on December 3rd 2024 before season 3 launches and takes the game until its closing date in June 3rd 2025.
This has been elaborated on in a statement from executive producer Mark Rubin on X, where it also confirmed that anyone who purchased the Ultimate Founders Pack will receive a full refund."
"And this is, I'm going to bring this up here actually a minute, and I'll make it bigger in a minute and we'll talk about it.
So this is the full statement from Ubisoft.
Hello X-Defiant fans, I'm unfortunately here to announce that X-Defiant will be shutting down starting today December 3rd 2024, new downloads and player registrations will no longer be available."
"We will still release our season 3 content in the near future, exact date TBD, and the servers will remain active until June 3rd 2025.
For those who purchased the Ultimate Founders Pack, you'll receive a full refund.
Players who made any purchases within the last 30 days will also be fully refunded."
"These refunds should happen automatically within 8 weeks of today and you can find out more details on our official website.
A few years ago, Ubisoft and the SF dev team embarked on a bold new adventure to develop a new arcade shooter called X-Defiant."
"It was from the start an incredible challenge, not only were we trying to shake up the genre by removing skill based matchmaking, SPMM, while bringing back a more old school arcade shooter experience, but we were also diving into the high risk, high reward realm of free to play."
"And for that, I want to applaud not only the dev team, but also Ubisoft leadership for taking that chance.
Free to play in particular is a long journey.
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 too sensible to continue.
I'm of course heartbroken to have to be writing this post, yes the game has been a personal passion for me for years and yes I know that not all challenges lead to a victory, but I want to recognise all the developers who are being affected by this closure, each and every one of them is a real person with a real life separate from our own and they have put so much work of their own passion into making this game and I hope that they can be proud of what they did achieve."
"I know that I'll always be proud and grateful to have worked with such a great team, a team that really punched above its weight class.
And what they achieved is truly remarkable.
The early response from players when X-Defiant launched was amazing, we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game."
"That is something to be extremely proud of, especially considering how tough this genre is.
So thank you to all of you to making the developers who put their passion into this game.
One last post."
"And then if there's one thing I hope we can all take away from this experience it's the importance of open honest communication between developers and players.
This player first mentality along with respectful non-toxic conversations between developers and players has been one of the standard differences that made X-Defiant so special."
"From the very first post about X-Defiant, this was the vision I wanted to champion.
I hope it leaves a positive mark on how the games industry treats its players and communities.
To our players, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I want to express my deepest gratitude from the incredible community that has grown around X-Defiant."
"Your passion, creativity and dedication have inspired us every step of the way.
With the utmost love and respect, Mark.
Now if we just quickly head back over here, there's one thing that this statement doesn't actually confirm or doesn't talk about."
"And it's this bit here, it's the consequences of X-Defiant.
So Mark's post is very positive, talking about the highs that the game achieved.
This is the lows that the game also delivered due to its failure.
So this is, again, from Insider Gaming, from the report that they published where they say, as you can imagine, the failure will have consequences on Ubisoft Studios in Osaka and San Francisco, expected to be hit hard with a total of 170 to 180 losing their jobs."
"Season three will thus be the game's last entire season, run with a skeleton crew until the game is shut down.
Now I think another really interesting part about this is how it will also affect other future Ubisoft games."
"Because amid the turmoil of Assassin's Creed Shadows and the whole topic of conversation surrounding its cultural authenticity and representation of Japan, Ubisoft constantly said we have multiple studios in Japan.
We have Ubisoft Osaka and Ubisoft, I think it was Tokyo."
"And we leaned on these developers to help make sure that the game is authentic and properly represented.
Well, Osaka is now facing layoffs, which means it's a bit of a hollow statement when you look back at it and the way they've treated things like that."
"The Ubisoft San Francisco studio facing big layoffs doesn't exactly hugely surprise me in this regard, because that was the sort of the leading developer of X-Defiant.
But yeah, it is strange to me in a way that Osaka has also been hit with layoffs, considering they were probably a support studio in this situation."
"But yeah, the key thing to take from this, though, is that X-Defiant is closing down.
It's been, I would say, a pretty disappointing run.
I think they had a really strong base and they just didn't quite understand how to do a free to play model."
"I don't think they really at all cracked the way to monetize this game.
And because of it, you know, at this point, we're like seven months down the line and the announcement has been made that the game is being killed off.
And I would say that if it wasn't for Concord this year, stealing all the headlines, this would probably be the biggest sort of like shock story of 2024."
"So big news.
We'll have to see how this further affects Ubisoft in the future.
But yeah, that's all the time that I have in today's episode of GeoTV News, but I'll be back now tomorrow for the next one of the week."
"So stay tuned for that.
Thank you for watching.
We'll see you on the other one.
Take care."
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