XDefiant is a strategical first-person shooter game released by Ubisoft in 2024. The game reached great heights in a time when Call of Duty was lacking, and fans were yearning for something to fill the void. Many considered it to be a “CoD killer” when it was reaching player peaks of over 1 million concurrent players and over 10 million unique players within the first 2 weeks. There was a lot of popularity over YouTube and Twitter with the game combining elements and characters from a variety of Ubisoft projects – even the Rabbids!

*Image: Practice area in game with some Ubisoft characters (left) (Source: XDefiant Fan Kit)*

Many first-person shooter players were looking for something new and exciting – especially CoD players and almost out of nowhere XDefiant appeared. CoD Modern Warfare 3 had grown stale to many fans with the multiplayer growing repetitive whereas XDefiant had come onto the scene with fluent movement, unique abilities, and weapons from our favourite Ubisoft games. The evidence supports this with the next full month after XDefiants release showing Modern Warfare 3 losing over 100,000 players and sitting steady around 2 million monthly players following that until the release of Black Ops 6.

However recently the popularity of XDefiant took a huge dip, and it seems the release of Black Ops 6 may have been the final nail in the coffin. The main popularity came in the earlier weeks of the game but swiftly fell off which has resulted in producer Mark Rubin announcing that due to high cost to maintain it – the servers will shut down in June 2025 with downloads and new player registrations closing on December 3rd of 2024. This came as a big shock to many because less than a month before the news broke Mark had announced that they had no plans to shut down. Despite the closing of the servers, player counts have continued to rise until recent months, but the online talking points of the game have almost disappeared compared to the constant video and stream recommendations it had earlier in the year.

*Image: Mark Rubin announces closing of XDefiant (Source: Twitter)*

The issues around XDefiant had been brewing for a long time with reports of a toxic work culture coming from inside – including an internal investigation, along with this there was many shortcomings, and the studio constantly failed to meet the expectations of the players especially with the high standards set in the early days. Ultimately, they released a product which wasn't fully finished with the intention of rolling content out slowly which in a competitive gaming area like first person shooters could be argued was doomed from the get-go.

It's no doubt that XDefiant temporarily filled a hole where Call of Duty was failing. While I had fun with it originally the issues in the game - such as body shots being one hit kills when jumping or sliding or bullets and player movement looking faster than it was - became way too prevalent and the studio weren't fast enough to roll out fixes. The crash was inevitable and now with over 300 employees being laid off, it'll be interesting to see if it manages to survive all the way to June. With the player base dropping but still being just over 1 million currently but no new players able to come in it feels almost destined that the numbers will rocket down as the months go on especially with the positive response that Black Ops 6 has had since its release in October – perhaps XDefiant was just a placeholder and too heavily banked on by Ubisoft.

XDefiant – The “CoD killer” which has been left to decay