Ubisoft’s XDefiant Is Officially Shut Down

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XDefiant, the free-to-play, first-person arena shooter developed and published by Ubisoft, is officially offline. The servers are now closed, according to a post on the games’ official X page.

The servers are now closed – Thank you to everyone who played the game ❤️
XDefiant logging off – o7

— XDefiant (@PlayXDefiant) June 4, 2025

XDefiant’s days have been numbered since Ubisoft announced that the game would be shut down in December 2024. An announcement shared on XDefiant’s X page said that the shooter didn’t gain enough traction with players and that it was too much to “sensibly continue.”

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Now Playing: XDefiant – Official Launch Trailer

“Free-to-play, in particular, is a long journey,” executive producer Mark Rubin wrote in the post. “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 team’s working on the game were prepared to make until very recently. But unfortunately, the journey became too much to sensibly continue.”

XDefiant attempted to buck a trend that many other online multiplayer games followed by ditching SBMM (skill-based matchmaking) in favor of what Rubin called the “old school arcade shooter” experience. The experiment, which launched in May 2024, was not successful as the shooter barely lasted six months before its publisher began the process of shutting it down.

Half the XDefiant team has been transitioning to “other roles within Ubisoft” since that original announcement in December. According to Insider Gaming, a “skeleton crew” was kept on to run XDefiant until its servers shut down this week. 300 people at Ubisoft were impacted by layoffs following the decision by Ubisoft to shutter XDefiant.

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