Ubisoft this week announced that XDefiant would be joining the recently axed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. As of December 3, the free-to-play first-person shooter will no longer be available to download, and no new players will be allowed to create an account. On June 3, 2025, XDefiant's servers will officially be shut down, making the game unplayable for old and new players alike. Along with the announcement of the closure, the development team behind XDefiant will also see significant changes, with 277 developers being laid off as a result of the shut-down, according to Stephen Totilo on BlueSky.

The remaining development team will be kept on to manage the game throughout its sunsetting until June 2025. It's not really a surprise that XDefiant is shutting down, despite the game's executive producer vehemently denying the allegations of the same as recently as October this year. While the exact reason for the game's closure wasn't revealed, news broke about XDefiant's struggles soon after its March 2024 launch, and it appears that the staunch competition in the space and the difficulties of monetizing a free-to-play game, even one that tries to break the mold, was just too much for XDefiant and its developer team.In a personal message Mark Rubin, XDefiant's executive director, he explains that the game's third season will still launch, although the exact date is still to be disclosed. He also alludes to the game's goals, which were to provide a more arcade-like experience whereby anyone could go up against anyone else, regardless of skill level. Curiously, it seems as though XDefiant failed in spite of its player base and not because of it. Despite whisperings of a declining player base, 15 million gamers supposedly played XDefiant, putting it on par with or ahead of something like The Finals, which only resides in the libraries of around 10 million Steam gamers, according to SteamDB.

And what they achieved is truly remarkable. The early response from players when XDefiant launched was amazing—we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game!

As we mentioned before, this isn't the first game to close up shop this year, never mind the first Ubisoft game to bite the dust, with The Crew and Prince of Persia preceding it. Overall, it appears that Ubisoft is having a bit of a tumultuous year, game closures and underwhelming performance aside. Gamers have already cast their aspersions about the upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows launch, effectively pressuring Ubisoft to push that launch back to February 2025.