Summary SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT 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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
Related Ubisoft Arena Shooter XDefiant Removes Tom Clancy Name After Backlash Upon announcing details about Insider Sessions on PC, Ubisoft confirmed that arena shooter XDefiant no longer carries the Tom Clancy branding.