I guess the closed beta for Ubisoft’s free-to-play shooter Xceeded Xpectations.
Ubisoft’s upcoming 6v6 shooter XDefiant is doing pretty well for itself in closed beta. According to the publisher (opens in new tab), it’s attracted a million players so far. For a while, it was even beating Modern Warfare 2 on Twitch, although viewership has fallen off as the beta has gone on—it’s got about 12K viewers (opens in new tab) as I write this.
For some FPS players, the free-to-play XDefiant could be the faster, twitcher alternative to today’s Call of Duty games they’ve been waiting for—an exciting new stage for the production of quickscoping highlight reels. As I observed earlier this week, there’s a direct connection to older CoDs here: XDefiant is being produced by Mark Rubin (opens in new tab), the producer of the first two original Modern Warfares, and recently got some praise from Robert Bowling, who also worked on those games.
