Ubisoft announced today that it is discontinuing development of XDefiant, the free-to-play first-person shooter game released earlier this year.
Starting today, the game will no longer be available for download. For those still playing, Season 3 will be released in the near future and the servers will remain active until June 3, 2025. The game has over 15 million people logged in and playing, and despite being the fastest Ubisoft game to reach over 5 million users, unfortunately there isn’t enough to sustain it in the long term. It wasn’t.
Unfortunately, this will result in almost 300 people losing their jobs, some of them from our Sydney studio (134 from Osaka/Sydney). This is clearly a huge loss for the local industry, which has already faced difficult conditions over the past 12 months. Studios in Osaka and San Francisco will be permanently closed, while the Sydney studio is said to be “downsized.”
“Today, Ubisoft announced that it is discontinuing development of XDefiant, a free-to-play first-person shooter. As a result, half of the worldwide XDefiant team This decision also results in the closure of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and the reduction of our Sydney production footprint, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and two in Osaka and Sydney. 134 people are expected to depart,” Ubisoft said in a statement.
You can read the full blog post on the Ubisoft website here.
