XDefiant has officially closed down its servers for good, and the shooter’s Executive Producer has decided to leave the industry altogether following its demise.
When it was first announced back in 2021, Ubisoft’s XDefiant was hotly anticipated by FPS fans and seen as a real contender to Call of Duty‘s crown. The free-to-play arena shooter was making all the right noises by focusing on competitive 6v6 matches without skill-based matchmaking.
However, despite a successful launch in May 2024, interest quickly died off in the following months. So much so that in December 2024, it was confirmed that Ubisoft was ending development of the game, and it would soon be shut down for good.
On June 3, 2025, the servers finally went offline, and players can no longer access XDefiant. Shortly after, Executive Producer Mark Rubin shed some light on the difficulties the project faced, before confirming that he’s decided to leave the gaming industry.
Former COD dev Mark Rubin explains why XDefiant shut down
In a lengthy X post shared on the “sad day” that XDefiant came to an end, Rubin, who produced Call of Duty 4, MW2, and MW3, laid some of the blame on the “little to no marketing” they received after launch. But this was just one issue, as he also outlined some of the other challenges the team faced.
“We had other issues though as well that we tried to be transparent about,” he explained. “For one 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.
“This tech debt included the dreaded netcode issues that we could just not solve given the architecture we were dealing with.”
He went on to mention that the team never had enough resources, so they struggled to flesh XDefiant out with the amount of content needed to keep players engaged:
“What we saw at Season 3 wasn’t even enough content in my mind for 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.”
Towards the end of the post, Rubin praised his development team, who were all let go from Ubisoft in late 2024, for creating “some of the best maps ever made for an arcade shooter.” Finally, when discussing his own future, he revealed that he won’t be moving on to another job in the games industry.
“As for me, I’ve decided to leave the industry and spend more time with my family so unfortunately you won’t be hearing about me making another game.”
“I do care passionately about the shooter space and hope that someone else can pick up the flag that I was trying to carry and make games again that care about the players, treat them with respect and listen to what they have to say.”
The good news is that many of the other devs who worked on XDefiant have been snapped up by other teams, so we might see them popping up on new projects very soon.
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