Ubisoft’s new online shooter XDefiant is doing better than expected, as its initial server problems already seem to be over.
Free-to-play arena shooter XDefiant had a rocky start, after its May 21 launch, seeing many fans unable to play matchmaking due to server issues.
Although Ubisoft hasn’t publicly stated that the servers are fixed, a new patch has been issued and social media has gone quiet about it.
Despite this hiccup, player numbers are continuing to grow and are about to hit 8 million unique players in just one week, already passing its monthly goal of five million.
The internal goal was for XDefiant to have five million unique players within a month of release, but it has reached 7.6 million unique players in its first week.
XDefiant peaked at 700,000 concurrent players on Monday, according to Insider Gaming.
The website also reports that XDefiant reached 1 million unique players in 2.5 hours, making it the fastest game to reach 1 million ever.
Concurrent players measures the amount of players playing at the same time and is a more insightful metric than unique players.
A unique player is someone who has downloaded the game and opened it, and so it’s not the most useful metric to gauge medium or long-term success for a free-to-play game.
That being said, exceeding their monthly expectation by three million, in just the first week, is still a very good sign.
As a shooter, XDefiant is competing with behemoths like Apex Legends and Call Of Duty, and at the moment at least it seems to be doing very well – perhaps because Call Of Duty hasn’t had any serious competition in a long while.
However, this year has already seen a number of new online titles that have enjoyed record-breaking launches, only to quickly dwindle in popularity afterwards.
Palworld’s fall from grace was especially calamitous but Helldivers 2 has also seen a notable drop-off in players over the last couple of weeks.
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