In principle, XDefiant was born to be a great competitor of Call of Duty. However, its life immediately begins with a decision that makes this job very difficult…
Surrounded by controversy and after countless delays, Ubisoft’s Call of Duty finally has a release date. The French developer raised our expectations very high with the release of XDefiant. With an arcade shooter that many fell in love with during the first beta, whose image was marred by a development in which a toxic work environment prevailed. However, past problems are not the only things that concern us when we talk about the video game. Even more dangerous to its success is the fact that Ubisoft is about to make a massive mistake with it.
XDefiant will need all the help you can get
Although not clearly confirmed, it seems that XDefiant will not be available on Steam. The developer no longer publishes its games in the Valve store. Bring them to the platform no more than a few months after their release. This decision can be problematic for the future. It’s not the same as releasing a new Assassin’s Creed exclusively in the store. After all, they are trying to compete with Call of Duty. In addition, with a completely new, unknown product. People will not search everywhere in advance. You have to work hard to convince users.
The Call of Duty series also wanted to ditch Steam when it decided to pull games from the store and make them exclusive on Battle.Net in an effort to attract users and grow the platform.
However, Activision’s attempt to offer the digital PC version of Call of Duty exclusively through Battle.Net failed miserably. Not because Battle.Net is a horrible client. It was simply that the audience for Call of Duty on PC is different from the audience for World of Warcraft or Diablo IV. More importantly, they didn’t even want to be there. Many users simply refused to go that extra step for the most successful war saga in gaming history. Will they do for XDefiant what they didn’t want for Call of Duty? It’s hard to imagine.
Has CoD fallen into the trap of single-player titles?
There is a significant difference between single-player games and live-service games. With the former, the number of simultaneous users is irrelevant. The quality or longevity of a title does not depend on how many people play it simultaneously. In this sense, many large companies would accept to sell fewer copies in exchange for a slight increase in revenue. This can be achieved by releasing the game exclusively on their own store or the Epic Games Store.
This way, revenue sharing is more generous to developers and compensates for units not sold because they aren’t on Steam.
However, multiplayer games as a service (especially PvP) get better with more users. The number of players means tighter matches, shorter wait times and more opportunities for the community. A giant “customer base” means that more and more “customers” arrive. Furthermore, a large “customer” base brings more and more “customers”. The lower the accessibility, the more likely the game will crash somewhere.
Ubisoft isn’t in the best shape, and things aren’t going to improve after disappointing sales for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and Skull and Bones (none of which were available on Steam).
Worse, now that something seems to be promising commercially, they may end up screwing themselves. We will learn more about the company’s general situation in the final report on the financial year, which will be published on May 15. But I wouldn’t be optimistic about its content.
Despite all this, Ubisoft may surprise us until the release of XDefiant. There should be a pre-order wishlist page in the Valve store by now. But maybe there will be one last surprise, or the game will be released on the platform in the future. We just hope they don’t wait until it’s too late this time. They did something similar with the long-forgotten Roller Champions half a year after its release, and the game was able to reach a ridiculous “peak” of 140 concurrent users…
Leave a Reply