'The game is absolutely not dying': XDefiant boss rejects claims that Ubisoft's shooter is struggling to find players

Ubisoft has forcefully denied claims that its free-to-play FPS XDefiant is struggling to find players, saying in its year one update that while there's always room for improvement on the technical and content sides, the game itself is «doing well.»

«I just want to quickly address the status of the game. ie, is the game dying?» Mark—who I take to be XDefiant executive producer Mark Rubin—wrote in the update. «No, the game is absolutely not dying. We know there are things we need to improve like Netcode/Hitreg and adding more content to progression, but the game is doing well.

»We just want it to do better. And we do that by addressing the concerns of our community which has always been the plan. Ubisoft is very much behind us and has allocated more resources to the team in order for us to do that."

Rubin's remarks were prompted by several reports saying that XDefiant is in a bad way, including an Insider Gaming article that claimed XDefiant is on «borrowed time» and a recent comment from Midcap Partners analyst Charles-Louis Planade, who said earlier in September that interest in XDefiant has not held up despite its strong launch.

XDefiant isn't currently on Steam so we can't check concurrent player counts there, but numbers on TwitchTracker, which monitors viewership on Twitch, are not encouraging: From a high of more than 203,000 concurrent viewers in May 2024, XDefiant currently has fewer than 1,000 people watching. By way of comparison, 101,000 people are currently watching Valorant. That's not necessarily a sign of distress, because Twitch rankings aren't always indicative of popularity: The most-watched shooters on the platform are also the most competitive, and XDefiant is inherently less competitive than Valorant or even Ubisoft's other FPS, Rainbow Six Siege. But neither is it especially encouraging.

Ubisoft's recent offer of $9 worth of in-game currency for playing XDefiant didn't exactly turn those game-in-trouble impressions around. Why, after all, would