We expected XDefiant to land on GeForce NOW and Amazon Luna earlier this week when it went live on other platforms.
The GeForce NOW team had previously tweeted that it was coming “at launch”:
In fairness, this tweet was from a year ago and the game’s schedule ended up changing significantly after that point.
And, while Amazon Luna is conspicuously absent from some of the game webpages (which is not unique among Ubisoft games), Luna is still mentioned as a supported platform in Ubisoft Press material.
The Game Hasn’t Arrived. Is it still coming?
Despite the above indications that the game would be coming, the game hasn’t arrived on either service. So, what gives? Is it still coming?
We’ve reached out to some of our contacts at the various companies involved. While the response hasn’t been total silence, it also hasn’t been very informative either. In particular, we have not gotten an indication that the game is coming to the cloud anytime soon.
Because of that lack of confirmation, we’ve removed the “coming” status from our catalog page for the game.
Does this mean other Ubisoft games won’t arrive in the cloud?
We wouldn’t read too much into the lack of XDefiant in the cloud just yet. Star Wars Outlaws was much more recently (and in more places) announced as coming to both GeForce NOW and Luna. Ubisoft has always been a strong supporter of many cloud gaming services.
The most likely explanation is simply that XDefiant is not yet ready for the cloud for any number of reasons. Perhaps something about the anti-cheat system or precisely tuned competitive integrity settings are keeping Ubisoft from launching the game in the cloud.
If something does change with Ubisoft’s plans for cloud delivery of other titles, we’ll be certain to let you know. They now own the cloud gaming rights to the Activision/Blizzard catalog of games and have yet to make any moves with them. Presumably, they have at least some new cloud gaming strategies ready to be executed.
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I know someone at Ubisoft fairly close to the project and they were expecting a day and date appearance on GFN and Luna too. I think the decision to hold off on both platforms was simply to see what engagement numbers were like first. By all accounts they did underestimate the concurrent users and struggled to keep up with demand, so it was probably a sensible move. Helldivers 2 famously went through the same server challenges and my guess is rather than compound the potential woes they felt it was better to let it bed in first. That’s the kind of decision neither of the cloud services would have necessarily been privy too, especially if it was a last minute one based on field tests.
Thanks for that info Rokk!