Ubisoft has not been having a good time lately. Amidst tanking stock prices, underperforming games, significant delays, and internal investigations, the embattled company has openly added one more problem to its list of them, which surely must be approaching 99 by now: XDefiant and its financial failure.
XDefiant is Ubisoft’s answer to the hero shooter, and like many post-Overwatch entries in the genre, lacks much in the way of unique selling points to attract those beyond Ubisoft’s dedicated fanbase. The Smash Bros. approach of using factions from all over Ubisoft’s Ubiverse likely contributed to this, as your average gamer will have no idea who the Highwaymen are supposed to be.
After much denial about XDefiant, its performance, and its future, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot finally came clean in a recent investor call. In the call’s Q&A portion, Guillemot admitted that XDefiant was “behind expectations,” even given the company’s admittedly “lower expectation” for the game from the start.
In other words, the game Ubisoft had expected to underperform underperformed beyond even its expectations. The player count has been steadily dwindling since the game’s explosive launch, with XDefiant reportedly struggling to meet a target figure of 20,000 concurrent players across all of its platforms. XDefiant even getting a Season 3 is now a seriously contentious prospect, especially given the fact that Black Ops 6 is looming on the horizon like a vengeful leviathan out of myth.
As mentioned, this is part of a larger trend at Ubisoft, which is now finally looking inward after the back-to-back underperformance of XDefiant and Star Wars Outlaws. The next Assassin’s Creed has been put on hold for additional polish, indicating that Ubisoft might actually be learning something, little and late as it might be. Ultimately, trying to please everyone will result in pleasing no one—it’s just a shame XDefiant amounted to little more than a stumbling block on the way to learning that lesson.
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