The faith of XDefiant‘s diehard fanbase is beginning to waver. Concerns have continued to grow over the state of the game, with some failing to see how Ubisoft’s highly-touted shooter can survive beyond 12 months.
Ubisoft doesn’t provide concurrent player counts to prove a drop in interest around the title, but there are other signs, such as dwindling Twitch viewership, as pointed out by members of the community on X (formerly Twitter) on July 29. The game launched in May with over 75,000 tuning into various streamers, according to TwitchTracker, but the dropoff in viewership has been sharp with just over 1,000 watching, as of the time of writing.
Twitch viewership isn’t particularly indicative of a game’s success, but there are other signs, such as Ubisoft’s own Community Challenge system. Ubisoft provides an extra weekly challenge for players as a whole to complete to earn extra in-game goodies, but for the past month, the community has failed to meet the targets devs have set. This week’s challenge looks to be no different; needing 100 billion XP as a cohort, XDefiant players hadn’t even reached a quarter of the target with just two days left.
One of the XDefiant challenges required the playerbase to use abilities to get kills which, aside from such a lofty target set, wasn’t progressing due to a bug. This, plus the constant barrage of player complaints over long-standing issues like net code, as well as longer search times (something executive producer Mark Rubin said the team was addressing), have many worried XDefiant is on the way out.
Those who are already abandoning the game have been particularly stinging on their way out, with one suggesting the jaded community is being forced to “eat the dirt” Ubisoft made after teeing up “false hope.” Others suggested they’d been lied to about the game being ready, and one even suggested it simply isn’t fun to play anymore.
All eyes turn to late October for the release of competitor Call of Duty‘s Black Ops 6. The Ubisoft shooter was set to arrive around the same time as Modern Warfare 3 last year but constant issues and delays saw players wait almost a full year to play—with XDefiant dodging the CoD release.
They won’t be dodging Black Ops 6 and CoD‘s arrival on the Game Pass, so we’ll be watching with keen interest to see where the XDefiant community’s loyalty truly lies. In the meantime, Ubisoft, can you please reduce the community challenge requirement?
