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Mark Rubin, the lead designer of Ubisoft’s now-dead free-to-play shooter XDefiant, has left the games industry following his project’s death.
A former Call of Duty lead, Rubin spent years developing Ubisoft’s enjoyable shooter. Unfortunately, a small player base despite fairly strong gameplay led the game to an early grave.
XDefiant lead retires from the games industry
As of Tuesday, June 3, 2025, XDefiant is no longer playable on any platform, and Rubin has announced their departure from the games industry.
Speaking to fans on social media, Rubin confirmed his plans to leave game development behind and spend more time with his family. However, the shooter developer also explained just what went wrong with Ubisoft’s game.
In the message, Rubin explained that “very little marketing” was a huge issue for the game, although it still managed to claim the “fastest acquisition of players in the first few weeks” for a Ubisoft game.
“Unfortunately, with little to no marketing, especially after launch, we weren’t acquiring new players after the initial launch,” Rubin explained.
Additionally, the developer explained that XDefiant’s Snowdrop Engine, which was used for The Division 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Star Wars Outlaws and more was not designed for a proper fast-paced multiplayer shooter, and the team was wrestling with years of “tech debt” and poor netcode that was hard to fix.
“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,” Rubin said. “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.”
“This tech debt included the dreaded netcode issues that we could just not solve given the architecture we were dealing with,” he continued. “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.”
Rubin explained that the entire team on xDefiant was let go last year, but those who worked on the game had already planned major features for the unreleased Season 4 and Season 4 updates. While players will never get those seasons, they would’ve included some “really cool features” that the team wanted to implement on launch but couldn’t.
“I really want to praise and salute all of the devs that worked on XDefiant,” the developer said. “The cards were heavily stacked against you, but you managed to produce a really fun and terrific game! 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.”
While Rubin is departing the games industry, the former CoD lead hopes that someone will “pick up the flag” and push modern multiplayer forward. The creator has often pushed against the current trend of microtransaction hell and skill-based matchmaking that plague modern games, but he won’t be the one to fix those issues.
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