With the official shutting down of the servers for Ubisoft’s competitive shooter XDefiant, executive producer on the game and 20-year industry veteran Mark Rubin has announced that he is retiring from the gaming industry. As caught by Insider Gaming, Rubin took to social media platform X to write a lengthy post announcing his decision.
While quite a bit of the post is about the shut down of XDefiant’s servers, Rubin has also noted that he will be leaving the industry as well. “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,” wrote Rubin.
“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.”
In other parts of his post, Rubin also spoke about the success XDefiant originally saw when it first came out last year, noting that the title had managed to garner quite a few players despite very little marketing. According to him, XDefiant boasted the fastest acquisition of players in its opening weeks in out of any of Ubisoft’s games.
“In fact, 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,” wrote Rubin. “But unfortunately, with little to no marketing, especially after launch, we weren’t acquiring new players after the initial launch.”
As for why XDefiant started losing players leading its its servers getting ultimately shut down, Rubin said that there were a number of different factors at play, including mounting tech debt for the developers that came about because they used an engine to power the game that wasn’t really meant for fast-paced competitive multiplayer shooters. The title’s netcode also suffered for similar reasons, since the engine wasn’t able to handle players with inconsistent connectivity well.
“I also think we made a decent impact in the space,” he wrote. “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.”
Back in May, Rubin had spoken about how studios should approach game development more like Larian Studios than Activision. He said that, rather than focusing on “FOMO (fear of missing out) marketing and EOMM (engagement-optimised matches).” studios should instead focus on making games with more player-centric design.
XDefiant was shut down after running its final season which was kicked off back in December. As part of the season, the game got three new factions and 13 new maps. Check out our coverage of the update for more details.
