After years of delays, Ubisoft launched its take on the arena shooter genre earlier this year in the form of XDefiant. The free-to-play entry had a surprisingly impressive launch in May, with the publisher touting that it had over 10 million players joining in just its first two weeks. However, it seems momentum has halted, and a new report says Ubisoft is not happy with its recent performance.
According to Ubisoft sources speaking to Insider-Gaming"s Tom Henderson, the company is pressuring the development studio, Ubisoft San Francisco, to increase its active player counts by the time Season 3 rolls around.
The report states that "continuously declining player numbers and lack of player spending" have made the studio not optimistic about the project. "The declining numbers have created tension and anxiety within the team, with sources who spoke to me believing that more layoffs are only a matter of time," Henderson adds. Ubisoft already announced some job cuts from its San Francisco offices earlier this month.
While Ubisoft has not shared player numbers for some time now, sources have noted that not even 20,000 players are currently active in XDefiant across PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.
It was only in July that Ubisoft shared that the launch of XDefiant was outperforming expectations. Alongside other live service games like Rainbow Six Siege and The Crew Motorfest, the freshly-released free-to-play shooter had contributed a lot to giving Ubisoft a "solid start to the year".
xDefiant celebrated the launch of Season 1 content in early July, so even if the concerning report is accurate, the studio still has some time to pull off a player resurgence. We might even see a Steam launch happen sooner rather than later, too, as the title is released on PC only via the Ubisoft Connect and Epic Games Store platforms. With a new Call of Duty around the corner, though, gaining players in the arena shooter landscape could be a tough battle in the short term.