'XDefiant' Executive Producer Calls Out 'Call Of Duty' For Manipulative Marketing Practices
Mark Rubin, the Executive Producer of Ubisoft’s cancelled XDefiant game, called out Activision and Call of Duty’s manipulative marketing practices.
In a post to X Rubin responded to an individual thanking him for XDefiant and claiming, “Activision deserves what’s happening to them for putting money and greed over just making a game that’s ‘fun.’”
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Rubin replied, “A lot of games, Call of Duty included just focus on how to make the most money possible out of the player base. They rely heavily on FOMO marketing and EOMM matches.”
“But I feel like it used to be just more about the quality of the game which would drive players to play,” he continued. “And that means making the game more player centric. i.e. less engagement based tactics and higher quality experiences for the players. Better maps, modes etc.”
“In other words your game should have a high player count because it's good and people want to play it rather than people playing it because the game has a $250M marketing budget. Everything is just said is very simplified as it would take too long to really go into it,” he concluded. “One last simple analogy. Be more like Larian, less like Activision.”
In a follow-up, he added, “And just want to add that there are some great people at Activision and their studios. I just think they evolved into something they weren't and haven't been able to escape.”
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Ubisoft announced it was shutting down XDefiant back in December with Ubisoft’s Chief Studios and Portfolio Officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert writing in , ““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.”
She then explained, “Concretely, that means that as of today, new downloads, player registrations and purchases will no longer be available. Season 3 will still launch, and the servers will remain active until June 3, 2025, out of appreciation for both our dev teams who worked on it and for XDefiant’s active players.”
Rubin went on to reveal that the game “broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game!”
However, in October he had previously admitted the game’s player counts were down. He wrote on X, “We have done very little marketing so yes our numbers are down but that is just to give the team the time to get the game in a better place before we do bigger spends on marketing to bring new players to the game and to bring back players that have left.”
Tom Henderson at Insider Gaming had previously claimed in August that the game was seeing continuously declining player numbers and lack of player spending.”
He reported that one source informed him that “the game has been struggling to obtain 20,000 concurrent players across all its platforms.”
Another source shared, “They [Ubisoft] would probably be happy with that number.” This suggests that the concurrent player number counts are much lower than 20,000.
In fact, Henderson also shared that if the game does not turn things around by Season 3 it “risks losing its much-needed post-launch support.”
What do you make of Rubin’s comments?