XDefiant Executive Producer On Issues Faced During the Game's Development

Following last December's decision, Ubisoft shut down the servers for its free-to-play shooter XDefiant on June 3, putting a stop to the slightly over a year lifetime of the FPS that was once aimed to be "Call of Duty killer."

The game's executive producer, Mark Rubin, who previously worked on the Call of Duty series at Activision, has published a heartfelt post on social media, talking about the challenges faced during the game's development as well as the reasons behind its cancellation.

The very first point he brought up was the lack of marketing. "We had very little marketing, especially after launch," Rubin wrote. "Although we had the fastest acquisition of players in the first few weeks for a Ubisoft title just from word-of-mouth promotion, we weren't acquiring new players after the initial launch." 

Besides being short on marketing resources, the game's development conditions weren't favorable either. "We had crippling tech debt using an engine that wasn’t designed for what we were doing, and we didn’t have the engineering resources to ever correct that," according to Rubin.

Creating a game with an improper engine sounds like walking on a pair of unfit shoes; it could result in slower speed as well as a sprained ankle. Adding to this desperation, the lack of technicians to get it corrected worsens the situation. As one player commented, the ranked mode was Not Playable from start to end, which has been a large complaint by the community. "We know but didn't have the people to fix it," is Rubin's answer.

Limited resources on marketing and technical manpower are not the only issue. Rubin admits that the team didn't have "the right resources to make content for the game." He believed that what was presented in Season 3 wasn't enough content for a proper launch. "There were some really cool features coming later in Season 4 or even 5 that would have completed the game in a way that I felt it should have been for launch."

The closure of a project is a sad fact, especially for the developers who poured their hearts into it. Nearly 300 developers were affected by the layoffs following the project shutdown. For Rubin, he has made the decision to leave the industry to spend more time with his family.