Ubisoft has today announced that it will discontinue development on XDefiant, it’s free-to-play first person shooter title that launched earlier this year.
Starting today, the game will no longer be downloadable. For those still playing, Season 3 will be released in the near future and the servers will remain active until June 03, 2025. Despite the game having over 15 million people login to play and it being the fastest Ubisoft game to surpass 5 million users, unfortunately that wasn’t enough to sustain it long-term.
Unfortunately as a result of this, almost 300 people will lose their jobs with some of these coming from the Sydney studio (134 from Osaka/Sydney). This is obviously a massive loss to our local industry, which has already faced a tough time over the last 12 months. Whilst the Osaka and San Francisco studios are being totally closed, it’s said that the Sydney studio will be “ramped down”.
“Today, Ubisoft announced that it will discontinue development on XDefiant, its free-to-play first-person shooter title. As a result, half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft. This decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney.” said Ubisoft in a statement.
You can read the full blog post over on the Ubisoft website HERE.