Another day passes, another live service game bites the dust. Ubisoft’sXDefiantshowed flashes of brilliance since its release a year ago, but that was not enough to impress its parent company. In December 2024, Ubisoft pulled the game from all storefronts, issued refunds for packs, and announced XDefiant would go dark in June.
A central figure to the rise and fall of XDefiant was its executive producer, Mark Rubin. He made his mark in the industry as the executive producer for Infinity Ward between 2005 and 2015, overseeing what’s widely regarded as the best era ofCall of Duty.
After 6 years working at Ubisoft,Rubin has announced that he is leaving not just the company, but the industry altogether. The reveal came at the end ofa post going into the troublesfaced by XDefiant from launch to closure.
Why Did XDefiant Fail?
Analyzing the downfall of a game is a little like giving a room a deep clean or engaging in an urban firefight—it’s important to work top to bottom.
At first glance, XDefiant looked like a promising title with unrealized potential. Polygon’s Cass Marshall described it as’Tom Clancy’s Smash Bros.', but lacking that “spark that kindled into genuine enthusiasm or excitement”. That didn’t stop it from initially succeeding, though.
Despite having a meagre marketing budget, Rubin says the game broke Ubisoft records for player acquisition in the first couple of weeks. XDefiant failed to capitalize on that organic headstart.
With little to no marketing, especially after launch, we weren’t acquiring new players after the initial launch. —Mark Rubin, XDefiant Executive Producer
However,all the marketing in the world could not fix the technical issues at the core of XDefiant. The game ran on Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine, introduced withThe Divisionbut still in use withStar Wars: Outlaws.
Per Rubin, the game suffered from “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.”
The most obvious direct consequence of this was the netcode crisis, which the developers “could not solve given the architecture we were dealing with”. For players, the end result of this was major instability with anything other than perfect, fast internet.
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Much like the engine choice, the business model of XDefiant was also incompatible with the team’s resources and overall vision. Thelive-service, free-to-playmodel relies on a constant stream of content with both quantity and quality to keep players interested.
Rubin says while the XDefiant developers had their heart in the right place, they just “didn’t have the gas to go the distance for a free-to-play game.”
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.
TheXDefiant team was laid offor transferred away in its entirety late last year, but while most members continue to work in the gaming industry, it looks like that’s the last we’ll see of Mark Rubin.
The veteran executive producer has quit Ubisoft and announced his decision “to leave the industry and spend more time” with his family. It’s the end of an era.
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