XDefiant becomes the latest live service thing to bite the bullet, with Ubisoft set to shutter studios and lay off up to 277 staff

XDefiant, Ubisoft's free-to-play FPS, has had its plug pulled. The publisher announced that it's "made the difficult decision to discontinue development" of the shooter, with the consequence being that up to 277 staff are set to be laid off as part of changes that'll see its San Francisco and Osaka studios be shut down, while its studio in Sydney will "ramp down".

This has all been outlined in a couple of statements put out by Ubisoft regarding this decision, one via a blog post on the company's website penned by chief studios and portfolio officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert, and another by XDefiant executive producer Mark Rubin on social media.

"Despite an encouraging start, the team’s passionate work, and a committed fan base, we’ve not been able to attract and retain enough players in the long run to compete at the level we aim for in the very demanding free-to-play FPS market," de Waubert wrote, "As a result, the game is too far away from reaching the results required to enable further significant investment, and we are announcing that we will be sunsetting it.

"Concretely, that means that as of today, new downloads, player registrations and purchases will no longer be available. Season three will still launch, and the servers will remain active until June 3, 2025, out of appreciation for both our dev teams who worked on it and for XDefiant’s active players."

Rubin's messaged added that: "For those who purchased the Ultimate Founder’s Pack, you’ll receive a full refund. Players who made any purchases within the last 30 days will also be fully refunded. Those refunds should happen automatically within eight weeks of today and you can find more details on our official website."

As part of the game's shutdown, Ubisoft says it's set to lay off staff, something we've seen way, way too much of across the games industry this year, and that likely stings even more in this case given news of it is dropping so close to the holidays.

According to de Waubert, "almost half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft", but 143 staff in San Francisco are losing their jobs, along with a further 134 "likely to depart" in Osaka and Sydney, making that aforementioned total of up to 277.

"Free-to-play, in particular, is a long journey," wrote Rubin, who denied shutdown rumours as recently as October, "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 teams working on the game were prepared to make until very recently. But unfortunately, the journey became too much to sensibly continue."

While it got to live a lot longer than Concord, the other high-profile shooter that a large company's taken out back and shot recently after it didn't create a huge an initial cash fountain - or just enough to be deemed worth keeping going long-term - it's still sad to see XDefiant go out like this.

The question of whether it could carve out enough of a dedicated audience in the long term was always the game's big burden to bear with Call of Duty dropping another would-be FPS genre attention-soaking behemoth in Black Ops 6, and has now been given a pretty definitive answer by Ubisoft, but both Connor and Fran had positive things to say about the game when they wrote about it for us around release.