The video game industry continues to falter, games continue to disappear, and studios continue to close. Things are bad. The new studio affected is Ubisoft San Francisco, as it will be closed and more than 150 developers who worked on a free shooting game released in April of this year and which did not meet expectations will be fired. The game in question is XDefiant and they have already given the date when it will stop working.
Through an official statement published on the game's websiteUbisoft announced that The game can no longer be downloaded, new players can no longer be registered or items purchased within the title.. Those who already play it will be able to enjoy season 3 of content that is close to its launch and continue playing until June 3, 2023date on which XDefiant It will stop working permanently. Season 4 would have been cancelled.
Those who purchased the special edition of the game and those who purchased credits within the last 30 days will receive a full refund.
Why did Ubisoft decide to turn off the servers? XDefiant?
Director of Studies Marie-Sophie de Waubert explained the following
«The game failed to attract and retain enough long-term players to compete at the level we were looking for in the demanding free-to-play FPS market. “As a result, the game is too far from achieving the results needed to justify further significant investments, and we are retiring it.”
Despite this, the numbers of XDefiant They weren't bad. Producer Mark Rubin explained that XDefiant It was the Ubisoft game that surpassed the five million player barrier the fastest. It eventually had 15 million registered players. In September, he had denied rumors that the game was doing poorly and said it had a great future ahead of it.. We don't believe he lied. Most likely, Ubisoft had told him to be calm, but he eventually changed his mind.
Despite the relatively good numbers of players, XDefiant It simply couldn't compete in a market where a few games are already at the top and grabbing all the attention of gamers.. Paid games like Call of Duty y Rainbow Six Siege —which is also from Ubisoft— have a captive audience that is not going to abandon their progress and their community in favor of other experiences regardless of whether they are free. If they did, they would prefer games that already have a space created, like Fortnite o Apex Legends.
To this we must add that the PC version was not available on Steam. As is well known, many players do not seem to have any interest in games that are not available on Valve's platform.
Things are going badly at Ubisoft
Despite having released excellent games in the last year, this French corporation's sales are not up to expectations. It doesn't matter how many millions of copies they sell Star Wars Outlaws y Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Nor how well the criticism of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Sales expectations are ridiculously high and they have to balance them with the millions of dollars lost due to failed launches like Skull & Bones.
This situation has the company on alert and its shareholders are pressing for it to be sold. It is for this reason that they decided to postpone Assassin’s Creed Shadows. At this moment they cannot bear that an installment of their most important saga has a bad reception and they decided to release it only when it is sufficiently polished and as bug-free as possible.
That, at least, was a good decision. However, it does not alleviate the pain of the hundreds of people who will be left without work. To the more than 150 Ubisoft employees who will be out of work, there are also more than a hundred who will be laid off from the Sydney (Australia) and Osaka (Japan) studios. The latter will also close completely.
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