Ubisoft‘s annual earnings report announced the cancelation of one of its most promising games in years in favor of focusing its efforts on a game almost certain to fail. It’s been a big week for Ubisoft, which also officially announced Assassin’s Creed Shadows with a cinematic trailer and a concrete release date. It reported that its earnings figures were on track with goals for 2024, with the potential for further growth brought about by the releases of Star Wars Outlaws and AC Shadows coming later this year.

But it’s not all positive. Along with all the good news, Ubisoft also announced the cancelation of a game several years in the making. It may not have been the most anticipated title, but it certainly had a lot to offer. Ubisoft’s reason for the cancelation is baffling, considering the other titles it plans to funnel the money and effort into.

Ubisoft Has Canceled The Division Heartland In Favor Of XDefiant & Rainbow Six Siege

A Promising Extraction Shooter, Or A CoD Clone?

In its earnings report for the 2023–2024 fiscal year, Ubisoft announced the cancelation of Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland, an extraction shooter, after four years of development. The Division Heartland would’ve combined The Division 2‘s player-versus-player-versus-environment, third-person extraction shooter gameplay with elements of the survival genre. Players would’ve had to manage their resources, addressing hunger, thirst, and air quality as they attempted to gather as much loot as possible and escape the map alive. What’s more, a pure extraction shooter makes perfect sense for The Division series. Its lore has always relied on the tension of exploring dangerous territory, which tracks perfectly with the mechanics inherent to an extraction-based game.

Ubisoft’s earnings report also delved into the reasons for this abrupt cancelation, saying it had “redeployed resources to bigger opportunities such as XDefiant and Rainbow Six” in an attempt to be more selective with its investments. The reliance on Rainbow Six as a moneymaker is understandable: with new content, free-to-play events, and durable popularity, Rainbow Six Siege is still worth playing in 2024. Focusing funds and staff on developing new content for that game, or even a new title in the Rainbow Six franchise, would make perfect business sense.

But XDefiant is a whole other ball game. It’s an unproven experiment, set loose in an oversaturated market. For those reasons among others, XDefiant seems doomed to fail, while the canceled The Division Heartland had a lot of potential.

There Was Plenty Of Room In The Extraction Shooter Genre For The Division Heartland

CoD DMZ, Escape From Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown, Marathon, & Even Helldivers 2 Justify Its Popularity

In recent years, extraction shooter games have become increasingly popular. The genre is defined by its distinct gameplay loop: players spawn in, gather as much loot as they can, and attempt to leave the map safely with all their gear and body parts intact. If they fail to reach the extraction point in time or good health, they lose everything they gathered – and sometimes, even the equipment they dropped in with.

Many of the most popular games in recent years have incorporated extraction modes or mechanics, proving that players still have a hunger for the genre. Of course, there’s Call of Duty‘s recurring DMZ mode. Hunt: Showdown is still going strong with its competitive bounty-hunting gameplay. Even this year’s surprise hit, Helldivers 2, features an extraction mechanic. It’s not an extraction shooter in the truest sense of the genre, but players do get incentives for boarding the shuttle at the end of each mission. Bungie’s revival of the Marathon series will also be an extraction shooter, but it could be years away at this point.

And then, there’s Escape from Tarkov. It was one of the first extraction shooters, and remains one of the most popular. That is, until recent controversy rocked the Tarkov boat and drove some players away. Last month, Escape from Tarkov developer Battlestate Games unveiled an exclusive Unheard Edition of the game, which would’ve cost $250 and featured unique equipment, alongside a PvE mode and priority in matchmaking queues. None of these extras were included for players who had earlier purchased the Edge of Darkness Edition, which promised to include access to all future DLC.

Battlestate Games eventually changed this release structure, but only partially: Edge of Darkness Edition buyers would get access to the PvE mode, only later than Unheard Edition buyers, and priority matchmaking was canceled. Still, some damage was done. Players criticized this pay-to-win strategy, and many left the game in droves, instead turning to Escape from Tarkov‘s competitors for their extraction shooter fix.

All that is to say that there’s a big enough niche in the extraction shooter genre for The Division Heartland to fill. DMZ, Hunt: Showdown, and Helldivers 2 can’t come out with new content fast enough to keep all their players engaged, and Escape from Tarkov‘s clumsy attempts at extracting more money are reducing trust and diminishing its player base. The Division series would’ve been able to fill the gap left by those games, and to do so seamlessly with its current lore. And as a free-to-play game, it’d inevitably pique some genre newcomers’ interests in a way that XDefiant will surely fail to do.

XDefiant Makes A Doomed Attempt To Steal CoD’s Crown

The Odds Are Stacked Against Ubisoft’s CoD Clone

Meanwhile, Ubisoft’s new preferred investment, XDefiant, has a tough battle ahead. It’s a multiplayer first-person arena shooter in the vein of Call of Duty, featuring rebel factions from across Ubisoft’s body of work. Besides its bizarre title, reminiscent of an embarrassing AIM screen name someone tried to leave behind in middle school, XDefiant just has too much competition from CoD. Veteran players, who have already invested so much time and money in CoD, are unlikely to make the switch. And for new players, if it comes down to a decision between the two, they’ll inevitably choose the one with better brand recognition and a bigger player base almost every time.

In a blog post earlier this month, Ubisoft also revealed that XDefiant won’t have skill-based matchmaking (SBMM), even in its casual playlists. Like most competitive multiplayer games today, XDefiant will have two matchmaking options: Casual Play and Ranked. Casual is mostly designed for, well, casual players: there are no consequences for losing or poor performance, besides a bruised ego. Ranked allows more competitive players to compare their skills to others worldwide. The more they win, the higher they’ll climb in the rankings; the more they lose, the lower they’ll fall.

Now, no SBMM is fine in Ranked – grouping players into ranks achieves the same effect, and allowing the cream to rise to the top is basically the whole point of that game mode. However, the lack of SBMM in XDefiant‘s Casual mode is effectively a death sentence for any kind of long-term appeal. Just a few short weeks after launch, players with hundreds of hours in the game will be able to dominate Casual playlists. That’ll be a complete turnoff for non-ranked players, not to mention anyone who tries to get into XDefiant further down the line only to get steamrolled every time they join a game.

Ultimately, canceling The Division Heartland in favor of focusing on XDefiant just seems like throwing good money after bad. The Division is an established series, and Heartland might’ve helped its case by leaning into a popular genre with a lot of content-starved players. XDefiant is a complete unknown, the David to CoD‘s Goliath. But the decision has been made – all that’s left is to see what Ubisoft makes of its new priority investments.

Sources: Ubisoft (1, 2)