‘You Won’t be Hearing About Me Making Another Game’ Ex-Call of Duty and XDefiant Producer Steps Away From Gaming

Summary

Mark Rubin, former XDefiant executive producer, announces he will be leaving the gaming industry.
XDefiant was shut down on June 4, just one year after its release.
Rubin became a well-known name in the FPS genre for his work on the Call of Duty series.

Former XDefiant executive producer Mark Rubin has announced he will be permanently stepping away from video game development after the first-person shooter was shut down this week. Rubin has become a household name in the gaming community after working on numerous Call of Duty titles, but the developer says fans won’t be hearing about him making another video game again after Ubisoft opted to shut down XDefiant just a year after its launch.

After working as an executive producer at Infinity Ward, developing various Call of Duty titles such as the original Modern Warfare and its 2009 sequel, Rubin joined Ubisoft in 2019 as an executive game director and producer for XDefiant. The free-to-play first-person shooter was quickly dubbed by fans as a “Call of Duty killer,” due to its lack of skill-based matchmaking, fast gameplay, and well-thought-out map design. Unfortunately, a little over six months after its release in May 2024, Ubisoft announced that the title would be shut down. The studio continued to release its Season 3 update, but XDefiant‘s servers were sadly shut down on June 4.

Man, I miss City of Heroes and XDefiant

Although there is a fan revival effort, I used to spend hours in City of Heroes before it shut down. I also think XDefiant got short-changed. It wasn’t revolutionary, but it was a fun Ubisoft-themed tactical hero shooter that was more than capable of holding up alongside its peers. Have you got a now-dead game that you miss?

Mark Rubin Says Farewell to the Gaming Industry

XDefiant now joins many other live-service titles to come and go in a flash, such as the controversial PS5 exclusive Concord, which shut down in September after just two weeks. Unfortunately, many of these shutdowns also come with studio closures and layoffs, which have been no different in the case of XDefiant. The entire team behind the shooter was let go last year, but the game’s executive producer Mark Rubin says he won’t be returning to the industry. In a lengthy post on Twitter, Rubin said he hopes his ex-colleagues find new positions quickly, but then revealed that he has decided to spend more time with his family. “Unfortunately, you won’t be hearing about me making another game,” Rubin said.

The former developer also touched upon why XDefiant turned into another failure for Ubisoft, stating that the shooter had “little to no marketing, especially after launch.” Rubin went on to explain how the studio also “had crippling tech debt using an engine that wasn’t designed for what we were doing,” which resulted in “dreaded netcode issues” that the studio could not solve due to the architecture it was working with. However, the executive producer believes that the shooter “made a decent impact in the space,” as there were lots of reactions from other games within the genre that saw what XDefiant was doing. Although Rubin didn’t specify, one thing XDefiant was heavily praised for was its lack of skill-based matchmaking in casual modes, something Call of Duty fans have often begged for.

Despite the impending shutdown, XDefiant still launched its Season 3 update in December 2024, which came with a metric ton of new multiplayer maps, factions, and more. But despite the fact that the new season was filled with content for players to check out, Rubin says it wasn’t enough. He went on to explain that the studio had “some really cool features” in the pipeline for Season 4 or 5 that “would have completed the game” in a way that it “should have been for launch.” Rubin ended his post by stating that he “cares passionately” about the shooter space and hopes that somebody else will one day pick up the flag that he 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.”