Ubisoft has forcefully denied claims that its free-to-play FPS XDefiant is struggling to seek out gamers, saying in its yr one replace that whereas there’s all the time room for enchancment on the technical and content material sides, the sport itself is “doing effectively.”
“I simply need to rapidly tackle the standing of the sport. ie, is the sport dying?” Mark—who I take to be XDefiant govt producer Mark Rubin—wrote within the replace. “No, the sport is completely not dying. We all know there are issues we have to enhance like Netcode/Hitreg and including extra content material to development, however the recreation is doing effectively.
“We simply need it to do higher. And we try this by addressing the considerations of our neighborhood which has all the time been the plan. Ubisoft may be very a lot behind us and has allotted extra assets to the crew to ensure that us to try this.”
Rubin’s remarks had been prompted by a number of stories saying that XDefiant is in a nasty method, together with an Insider Gaming article that claimed XDefiant is on “borrowed time” and a latest remark from Midcap Companions analyst Charles-Louis Planade, who mentioned earlier in September that curiosity in XDefiant has not held up regardless of its robust launch.
XDefiant is not at the moment on Steam so we will not verify concurrent participant counts there, however numbers on TwitchTracker, which displays viewership on Twitch, usually are not encouraging: From a excessive of greater than 203,000 concurrent viewers in Might 2024, XDefiant at the moment has fewer than 1,000 folks watching. By means of comparability, 101,000 persons are at the moment watching Valorant. That is not essentially an indication of misery, as a result of Twitch rankings aren’t all the time indicative of recognition: Probably the most-watched shooters on the platform are additionally probably the most aggressive, and XDefiant is inherently much less aggressive than Valorant and even Ubisoft’s different FPS, Rainbow Six Siege. However neither is it particularly encouraging.
Ubisoft’s latest provide of $9 price of in-game forex for taking part in XDefiant did not precisely flip these game-in-trouble impressions round. Why, in any case, would you basically bribe folks to play your recreation except you actually wanted them to play your recreation?
The much less cynical amongst us may say that Ubisoft would not want folks to play XDefiant, and that it is merely doing one thing enjoyable for followers to have a good time the tip of its first season. It is also price taking into consideration that whereas XDefiant is usually in comparison with Name of Obligation, the stakes are considerably decrease: It is being made by a smaller crew and on a a lot smaller price range, which in principle at the very least affords Ubisoft the chance to play the lengthy recreation fairly than simply cashing out on the first signal of hassle.
A turnaround would not be unprecedented. For Honor, Ubisoft’s medieval clobberin’ recreation, went via critical rising pains after it launched in 2017, and whereas it is by no means actually been a concurrent-player juggernaut, it has been a dependable, low-key workhorse, ticking alongside steadily through the years with a number of thousand folks taking part in at any given time. Given an opportunity, there is not any cause XDefiant could not discover itself the same area of interest.
Rubin additionally mentioned the continued work on XDefiant’s netcode and hit registration, saying Ubisoft has enlisted extra “specialist engineers” to assist enhance the programs. “It is a massive job, however everyone seems to be working as exhausting as doable to get this work in as quickly as doable,” he wrote. “It is exhausting to offer you a strong estimate as to when it is going to be prepared as a result of there may be a whole lot of iteration and testing time. However we’re hoping to see one thing in direction of the tip of Season 2 if not sooner.”