Ubisoft announced this week that their Call of Duty competitor XDefiant will be completely shut down on June 3, 2025.
Gamers who bought the Ultimate Founders Pack will receive a full refund, while others who made purchases since November 3rd of this year will get refunds on DLC or ingame coin purchases. The planned Season 3 update will drop sometime in the near future, but it will obviously be the last piece of content made for the game, and anyone who had not played the game before this week won’t be able to check it out, as new downloads, purchases or player registrations will be permitted (anyone who did play in the past is still able to redownload the title and play it until it goes dark in June 2025)
With this XDefiant becomes the latest in a fairly long line of live service games released by companies that try to go after market leaders without investing enough into their own offerings (in this case, Ubisoft was clearly trying to go for a slice of Call of Duty‘s success). While the game will have eventually lasted slightly more than a year when it’s sunset in 2025, it’s a situation that brings Sony’s Concord to mind. Investing in a live service game and pulling the plug less than a year after said title is live shows that whoever is in charge of decision making at these big publishers isn’t doing their job very well, and that ends up affecting the jobs of thousands of people who delivered exactly what they were asked to deliver, and yet end up being made redundant because the C-suite can never lose.
XDefiant wasn’t a terrible game by any means, but it wasn’t interesting enough to pull players away from their fast paced modern-day FPS of choice, which was Call of Duty. Or rather, it did garner a fairly healthy playerbase at launch, which then dwindled because the studio couldn’t provide updates at the pace it needed to. Should that have been the death knell for the whole team and game? In a less senseless world it wouldn’t have been, because success doesn’t necessarily come overnight for a project like this one. A similar story can be told about Anthem, Bioware‘s attempt at replicating Destiny for overlords EA, which ended up cancelling the 2.0 reboot of the game because they were perfectly fine having spent millions and millions of dollars making a title that underperformed, but couldn’t fathom spending some more to try to turn the ship around (which is even sadder when one considers that the original Destiny didn’t launch under the best circumstances, and it did require work to turn things around, but thankfully for Bungie back then, it got the time and money to do so)
How many of these stories will be told before the bubble bursts? How many families will have to hurriedly relocate because some faceless executive thought it’d be a good idea to challenge an already established behemoth under the assumption that their money sink would win right out of the gate? For the sake of this industry I hope not many, but sadly history makes me think next year we’ll see even more.