We already knew that Tom Clancy’s XDefiant had started off strong, with Tom Henderson reporting that it was Ubisoft’s fastest game to reach 1 million players. Yesterday, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed to the Ubisoft blog that XDefiant registered around 11 million players since its launch five weeks ago.
We need to continue to listen closely to our players and make well-informed decisions on where to focus our efforts, because if you succeed at GaaS, you can succeed for the long-term. Let’s look at XDefiant. There’s a lot of work to do, but it was able to attract 11 million players in a short time. And that number will increase with all the work done by the team to ensure Season One brings a lot more to the existing experience. It’s about making the right choices and sticking to them.
Outside of it being continually updated, with different experiences and optimized gameplay, I’d love to see it as a serious esport. But really, for a game like this, there’s no limit to its future. And we’ve got a fantastic team on it, who are listening to our players and communicating with them, which is so crucial. We’ve started off strong, but there’s still a long way to go, and I’m excited for us to step up to the challenge.
Granted, the game is free to play. Even so, those are certainly solid figures to build upon. XDefiant is still in its pre-season, with season one set to begin next Tuesday. It will add the GSK faction from Rainbow Six Siege, three new maps (Daytona, Clubhouse, and Rockefeller) that will be rolled out one per month, three new weapons, the proper launch of Ranked Play, a Capture the Flag game mode, and new progression rewards. There will be four seasons over the course of the game’s first year, each adding a new faction, three maps, three weapons, and more.
In other Ubisoft news, Yves Guillemot also confirmed that multiple Assassin’s Creed remakes are underway.
