Ubisoft's 'XDefiant' Executive Producer Blasts Company For Game's Failure While Announcing His Departure From The Industry
Mark Rubin, the Executive Producer for Ubisoft’s XDefiant game, which Ubisoft announced was being shut down in December, blasted Ubisoft for the game’s failure while announcing his departure from the video game industry.
In a lengthy post to X following the XDefiant servers being shut down on June 3rd, Rubin firmly put the blame for the game’s failure on Ubisoft not providing the resources the game needed.
He said, “I would say something remarkable happened with this game in that although we had very little marketing, we still had the fastest acquisition of players in the first few weeks for a Ubisoft title just from you guys all talking about and promoting the game. But unfortunately, with little to no marketing, especially after launch, we weren’t acquiring new players after the initial launch.”
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From there, he pointed to other problems such as the game’s in-house engine, “We had other issues though as well that we tried to be transparent about. 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.”
“I do personally think that in-house engines are not the valuable investment that they used to be and they are often doomed to fall behind big engines like Unreal,” he continued. “This tech debt included the dreaded netcode issues that we could just not solve given the architecture we were dealing with. And so, for many players with solid network connections (in both speed and consistent reliability) the game played well but if your connection had even the smallest amount of inconsistency the engine just couldn’t handle it and you would have a bad experience. Normally, you should be able to weather those bad moments on your network. But this was a major issue with XDefiant.”
Next, he claimed his team simply did not have the resources to create the content the game should have had at launch, “Another issue we had was having the right resources to make content for the game. 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. I can say everyone’s (devs, HQ leadership, etc.) heart was in the right place but we just didn’t have the gas to go the distance for a free-to-play game,” he stated.
He also acknowledged that the game’s ranked mode was unplayable sharing, “We know but didn't have the people to fix it.”
Despite the harsh criticism, Rubin shared his belief that the game had some of the best maps and forced competitors to react to what they were doing.
“And I like to call it out every time I talk about it, but I think our maps were some of the best maps ever made for an arcade shooter. So, congrats to everyone for what they accomplished,” he said. “I also think we made a decent impact in the space. We saw a lot of reactions from other games to what we were doing and that to me speaks volumes. I’m really sorry we couldn’t quite deliver and maintain this game for a longer time.”
Finally, he announced he is leaving the video game 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. Thank you again to everyone who had so much passion for XDefiant,” he concluded.
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As noted above, Ubisoft announced it was shutting down XDefiant in December. Ubisoft’s Chief Studios and Portfolio Officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert announced, “Despite an encouraging start, the team’s passionate work, and a committed fan base, we’ve not been able to attract and retain enough players in the long run to compete at the level we aim for in the very demanding free-to-play FPS market. As a result, the game is too far away from reaching the results required to enable further significant investment, and we are announcing that we will be sunsetting it.”
What do you make of Rubin’s criticism and his exit from the video game industry?
So no responsibility taken for creating a bad product. It's everybody else's fault. Typical.