Ubisoft’s latest title, XDefiant, started its closed beta testing phase on April 13, concluding it on April 23. It made quite an impression during its first week, becoming one of the most-watched games on Twitch and attracting a largely English-speaking audience.
XDefiant is an online multiplayer first-person shooter where teams of six fight each other. It will be free-to-play and aims to reach casual and competitive gamers via a unique feature where they can select from different characters with their own abilities and ultimates.
Its French developer revealed that this title has two categories — Arena and Linear. The former has a simple premise: the team with more points — scored by taking down opponents — at the end of the round wins. Linear matches will involve more tactical gameplay as one side will be on the offensive and the other on the defensive, akin to Counter-Strike or Valorant.
XDefiant will have 14 maps at launch, each with different game modes, including Occupy, Escort and Hot Shot, and Zone Control. Ranked Matchmaking will also be available, and each season is set to last three months. The start of a new season will bring new maps, factions, weapons, cosmetics, events, characters, and battle pass rewards.
XDefiant early access catapults game into top ten of games watched over past week
Over the first week of its closed beta, XDefiant attracted quite an audience, becoming the tenth most-watched game on Twitch, and eleventh overall when counting the Just Chatting genre. It racked up 5.49M Watch Hours between April 13 and April 19, helping it sneak into the top ten of this list. Ahead of this upcoming offering were massively-popular titles like Grand Theft Auto V, League of Legends, CS:GO, and Minecraft.
XDefiant also notched 34K Average Viewers, the tenth most during this period, and 100K Peak Viewers, 18th overall. Quite a lot of streamers got on the game’s bandwagon, helping it notch these impressive stats and giving Ubisoft validation for its closed beta phase of testing.
The title’s three biggest days in terms of watch hours came successively towards the end of its first week, hitting over 90K HW from April 16 to 18. As a result, the day with the highest concurrent viewership also came during this phase, April 17.
Interestingly, the first day of the closed beta release, April 13, had the second-highest concurrent viewership count, implying that fans and content creators were pretty eager for the game to come out so they could give it a try. However, it was the only day where the overall airtime was below 20 hours, perhaps suggesting that not everyone got hold of the game first up.
Coming to Twitch channels, it was XDefiant partner pixuy who topped the watch hours count with 349K HW. It has almost taken over his entire broadcasting time over the past month, accounting for 97.3% of the overall share of time spent gaming.
Only two other Twitch streamers hit the 200K-plus HW mark: TeePee and scump. However, among these two legendary Call of Duty names, the former spent considerable time playing this new multiplayer FPS. It took up 30.9% of his playtime over the past month, compared to just 6.6% for the now-retired pro. The fact that scump could get 214K PV despite playing for much lesser time again proves his popularity among shooting game fans, especially now that he’s a full-time gaming creator.
Considering the more successful streamers who have played the game, it isn’t surprising to find out that English was the most watched language at 42.23%. It is followed by German (23.03%) and French (12.93%), the only two other languages to make it to double figures.
In fourth and fifth are Portuguese (6.56%) and Spanish (5.41%), two major markets for shooter games and esports. With the title looking to reach competitive gamers, meaning a shot of birthing an esports scene, fans would do well to watch out for this space to get an idea of which markets and regions would best suit this move in the future.
XDefiant’s closed beta gets over in two days, and Ubisoft will be happy with the success it’s had. With that in mind, fans can expect a few more testing phases before the game comes out officially towards the end of the year.