Image: © samy/Stock.adobe.com
The layoffs are likely to affect teams based in the US, Japan and Australia.
France-based game developer Ubisoft has announced that it will be letting go of at least 277 employees, as part of plans to discontinue free-to-play, first-person shooter game XDefiant.
Launched in early 2024, the popular game has amassed 15m players, however, the company has said that while being proud of the achievement and the developers who worked to bring the game to life, it takes a long time for a project of this size to become profitable and “the journey became too much to sensibly continue”.
About half of the global XDefiant team will be transitioning to other roles in Ubisoft. Production studios in San Francisco and Osaka will be closing and the studio in Sydney will be “ramped down”, resulting in job loss for 277 Ubisoft employees. While the servers hosting gaming content will stay active until 3 June 2025 and refunds can be made for those who made a purchase in the last 30 days, downloads and player registration is no longer possible.
In a statement released by Ubisoft, Mark Rubin, the executive producer of XDefiant, said that he was heartbroken to have to write the post announcing the news and that he applauded all of the hard work carried out by the XDefiant team.
“A few years ago, Ubisoft and the SF Dev team embarked on a bold adventure to develop a new arcade shooter called XDefiant,” he said. “It was, from the start, an incredible challenge. Not only were we trying to shake up the genre by removing skill-based matchmaking while bringing back a more ‘old-school’ arcade shooter experience, but we were also diving into the high-risk, high-reward realm of free-to-play. And for that I want to applaud not only the Dev team but also Ubisoft leadership for taking that chance.
Ubisoft has faced a number of challenges this year as it previously announced that the next chapter of the much anticipated Assassin’s Creed franchise, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, which was set to be released in November 2024, will be delayed until next year.
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