'The game is absolutely not dying': XDefiant boss rejects claims that Ubisoft's shooter is struggling to find players

Ubisoft has forcefully denied claims that its free-to-play FPS XDefiant is struggling to find players, saying in its year one update that while there's always room for improvement on the technical and content sides, the game itself is "doing well."

"I just want to quickly address the status of the game. ie, is the game dying?" Mark—who I take to be XDefiant executive producer Mark Rubin—wrote in the update. "No, the game is absolutely not dying. We know there are things we need to improve like Netcode/Hitreg and adding more content to progression, but the game is doing well.

"We just want it to do better. And we do that by addressing the concerns of our community which has always been the plan. Ubisoft is very much behind us and has allocated more resources to the team in order for us to do that."

Rubin's remarks were prompted by several reports saying that XDefiant is in a bad way, including an Insider Gaming article that claimed XDefiant is on "borrowed time" and a recent comment from Midcap Partners analyst Charles-Louis Planade, who said earlier in September that interest in XDefiant has not held up despite its strong launch.

XDefiant isn't currently on Steam so we can't check concurrent player counts there, but numbers on TwitchTracker, which monitors viewership on Twitch, are not encouraging: From a high of more than 203,000 concurrent viewers in May 2024, XDefiant currently has fewer than 1,000 people watching. By way of comparison, 101,000 people are currently watching Valorant. That's not necessarily a sign of distress, because Twitch rankings aren't always indicative of popularity: The most-watched shooters on the platform are also the most competitive, and XDefiant is inherently less competitive than Valorant or even Ubisoft's other FPS, Rainbow Six Siege. But neither is it especially encouraging.

Ubisoft's recent offer of $9 worth of in-game currency for playing XDefiant didn't exactly turn those game-in-trouble impressions around. Why, after all, would you essentially bribe people to play your game unless you really needed them to play your game?

The less cynical among us might say that Ubisoft doesn't need people to play XDefiant, and that it's merely doing something fun for fans to celebrate the end of its first season. It's also worth bearing in mind that while XDefiant is sometimes compared to Call of Duty, the stakes are significantly lower: It's being made by a smaller team and on a much smaller budget, which in theory at least affords Ubisoft the opportunity to play the long game rather than just cashing out at the first sign of trouble.

A turnaround wouldn't be unprecedented. For Honor, Ubisoft's medieval clobberin' game, went through serious growing pains after it launched in 2017, and while it's never really been a concurrent-player juggernaut, it has been a reliable, low-key workhorse, ticking along steadily over the years with several thousand people playing at any given time. Given a chance, there's no reason XDefiant couldn't find itself a similar niche.

Rubin also discussed the ongoing work on XDefiant's netcode and hit registration, saying Ubisoft has enlisted more "specialist engineers" to help improve the systems. "This is a big task, but everyone is working as hard as possible to get this work in as soon as possible," he wrote. "It's hard to give you a solid estimate as to when it will be ready because there is a lot of iteration and testing time. But we're hoping to see something towards the end of Season 2 if not sooner."

TOPICS

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.