There are currently “no plans” to shut down Ubisoft’s free-to-play shooter XDefiant after season four.
That’s according to executive producer Mark Rubin, who took to social media to rebuke claims that the shooter would be calling it a day once its current roadmap comes to a close.
“I’ve literally been in meetings as of last week to discuss our Year 2 plans. But, right now we are super focused on improving the technical experience (which includes netcode) and adding more content for Seasons 3 and 4,” Rubin wrote on X.
The developer admitted the team had done “very little marketing” for the game, and as a result XDefiant player numbers “are down”.
However, Rubin said this is simply to enable the team to bring the game up to “a better place” than it currently is. It will then “do bigger spends on marketing to bring new players to the game and to bring back players that have left”.
Rubin’s comment comes a little less than a month since Ubisoft insisted its shooter was “absolutely not dying”. At this time, the company laid out XDefiant’s year one roadmap, which culminated with season four.
Meanwhile, back in July, Rubin acknowledged XDefiant had its fair share of bugs, but if players liked what the team was trying to do they should “stick around” to see the improvements.
Even before XDefiant made its debut earlier this year, it faced a number of stumbling blocks. The game was initially revealed as Tom Clancy’s XDefiant all the way back in 2021, however Ubisoft later announced it was dropping the prefix following criticism from Tom Clancy fans. It was felt by some that the XDefiant announcement had strayed too far from the franchise’s more serious military themes and formula.
With the Tom Clancy name dropped, XDefiant went on to have a number of tests, but not always very successfully. In fact, one beta was described as having a “horrible” server experience by Rubin himself.
XDefiant then missed a planned launch last year due to console certification issues. It subsequently received another delay in October, this time because of “inconsistencies in the game experience”.