Ubisoft Is Shutting Down XDefiant In June 2025 And Refunding All Founder’s Pack Players

XDefiant, the new arena shooter from Ubisoft’s team in San Francisco that was released just earlier this year will shut down on June 3, 2025, and anyone who purchased the game’s Ultimate Founder’s Pack will get a full refund. Players who made any purchase in the past 30 days will also get a refund.

The news was made official shortly after it was reported on Insider-Gaming, who’ve reported on the games issues over the course of 2024. A report from Stephen Totilo adds that the San Francisco team will be shut down along with the Osaka team, while the Sydney team will begin to ramp down.

All these closures mean up to 277 people will be laid off, with half of the XDefiant team moving to other projects. 1

Ubisoft’s swing at a free-to-play arena shooter that bundled up all its major IP into one game, creating something with the gameplay of Call of Duty multiplayer with a little hero-shooter thrown in and the character structure of Fortnite if it was Ubisoft-only IP was launched this past spring in May 2024.

And it’s first month went great. It surpassed 11 million players and by all accounts had a strong start. It wasn’t perfect, sure, but the gameplay and mix of heroes players could jump in as was a bit of freshness while wrapped in a familiar arena-shooter flavour that players enjoyed. At least for a little while.

For months, Ubisoft had fought back rumours that the game was headed exactly in this direction. This past October, executive producer Mark Rubin directly said that “there are no plans to shut down after Season 4” after reports of this happening.

In September, Ubisoft said that the game is “absolutely not dying,” while rumours swirled that it was indeed dying. Another report claimed that the game had until the end of its Season 3 to improve player numbers, or it would be shut down.

Now Season 4 won’t even launch, with the soon-to-come Season 3 which is set to release this month being the game’s final season until its sunset next June.

Rubin, who has also personally defended the game on social media multiple times against these allegations, was also the one who penned the goodbye statement to players that the game’s official Twitter account posted.

In the statement he admits what was obviously happening with the game, much as Ubisoft tried to deny it, the game lacked players but more importantly for Ubisoft, it lacked microtransaction sales. The game’s whole economic model just was not working.

After an opening where Rubin states the simple facts of what’s happening, that the game will be shut down and refunds will be sent to those eligible, he gets into what happened with XDefiant.

“A few years ago, Ubisoft and the SF Dev team embarked on a bold adventure to develop a new arcade shooter called XDefiant. It was from the start, an incredible challenge. Not only were we trying to shake up the genre by removing Skill-Based Matchmaking (SBMM) 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 no only the Dev team but also Ubisoft leadership or 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 to sensibly continue.

I am, of course, heartbroken to have to be writing this post. Yes, this game has been a personal passion for me for years and yes, I know that not all challenges lead to victory, but I also want to recognize all of 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 all put so much 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 will 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 XDefiant 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 the developers who put their passion into making this game!

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 standout differences that made XDefiant so special.

From my very first post about XDefiant, this was the vision I wanted to champion, and I hope it leaves a positive mark on how the game industry treats its players and communicates.

To our players, thank you! From the bottom of my heart, I want to express my deepest gratitude for the incredible community that has grown around XDefiant. Your passion, creativity, and dedication have inspired us every step of the way.

With the utmost of love and respect,

Mark.”

XDefiant is like the other side of the same coin as Concord. It had millions of players – 15 million players, according to Rubin – downloaded and played XDefiant. Yes, it was free-to-play, but that’s the benefit of XDefiant’s side of the coin.

Concord was a paid game, and it never came close to that kind of player count. But the result is the same, because in the end neither player wanted to pay for what they saw.

Despite the fact that at their core, both games were solid shooters. These weren’t bad games, just games that players didn’t like very much. Not enough to pay for them, anyways.

This announcement now stands as an unfortunate capping off to what was already a bad year for Ubisoft, and yet another sign of just how volatile this industry can be.

Source – [Ubisoft, Insider-Gaming, Stephen Totilo]