XDefiant CEO asserts game is not in decline, dismisses Ubisoft shooter's player shortage concerns

Ubisoft has forcefully denied claims that its free-to-play FPS XDefiant is struggling to seek out gamers, saying in its year one update that whereas there's at all times room for enchancment on the technical and content material 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 govt producer Mark Rubin—wrote in the replace. “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 simply need it to do higher. And we try this by addressing the concerns of our neighborhood which has at all times been the plan. Ubisoft is very a lot behind us and has allotted extra assets to the crew in order for us to do this.”

Rubin's remarks have been prompted by a number of experiences saying that XDefiant is in a foul manner, together with 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 giant activity, however everybody is working as exhausting as doable to get this work in as quickly as doable,” he wrote. “It's exhausting to present you a stable estimate as to when it will likely be prepared as a result of there is loads of iteration and testing time. But we're hoping to see one thing in direction of the tip of Season 2 if not sooner.”