XDefiant

XDefiant was UbisoftPublisherUbisoftUbisoft is the publisher of Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor, and other multiplayer titles, and of XDefiant until its servers closed in June 2025. Its competitive games rely on BattlEye and Easy Anti-Cheat for kernel-mode protection, and in August 2026 it said a dedicated Ubisoft Security team is building a shared kernel-level anti-cheat for all its games, with Rainbow Six Siege among the first.2 games in this family →'s free-to-play arena shooter, developed by Ubisoft San Francisco and reported to run on Ubisoft's SnowdropEngineSnowdropSnowdrop is Ubisoft's in-house game engine, built by Massive Entertainment and introduced with Tom Clancy's The Division. XDefiant was built on it.1 game in this family → engine. It launched on May 21, 2024 on PC through Ubisoft Connect, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, and pitched an old-school arcade feel without skill-based matchmaking. Ubisoft announced its end on December 3, 2024, stopped new downloads, registrations, and purchases that day, and kept servers up until June 3, 2025. This plate is kept as a record of what the game asked of a PC and what a former player may still want to clean up.

If XDefiant is still installed, uninstall it from Ubisoft Connect or from Windows. Before you do, look in the game's BattlEyeAnti-cheatBattlEyeBattlEye is the kernel anti-cheat from BattlEye Innovations GmbH (Reutlingen, Germany), founded 2004. One of the longest-running kernel anti-cheats in PC gaming. The kernel driver (bedaisy.sys) and user-mode service (BEService.exe) are both catalogued in the Field Guide.8 games in this family → folder for Uninstall_BattlEye.bat and run it, which is BattlEye's documented removal method; if the folder is already gone, BattlEye says sc delete BEService from an administrator command prompt does the same. Skip that step if you still play another BattlEye game, such as Rainbow Six Siege, which needs the service. By BattlEye's own account a leftover service is dormant when no protected game is running, so this is housekeeping, not an emergency.

On PC, XDefiant used BattlEye, the kernel-level anti-cheat Ubisoft also uses on Rainbow Six Siege. That rests on launch-week reporting, by Charlie INTEL and SteamDeckHQ, because Ubisoft's XDefiant support pages are no longer online; SteamDeckHQ found the game would not run on Steam Deck, likely because BattlEye was not enabled for Linux. BattlEye's own FAQ says it is active only while you play a protected game. Neither Ubisoft nor BattlEye documents whether uninstalling XDefiant also removes the BattlEye service; BattlEye says only that some games do this automatically. Process names and any firmware asks are not confirmed in a surviving source.

Mark Rubin, the executive producer, was publicly engaged on cheating: on June 23, 2024 he wrote that hardware and IP bans can be spoofed and that the industry should push to make cheating illegal. On December 3, 2024, Ubisoft said it had not attracted and retained enough players to compete in free-to-play shooters. The decision closed the San Francisco and Osaka production studios and ramped down Sydney, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney. Rubin's message promised full refunds for the Ultimate Founder's Pack and for recent purchases, paid automatically within eight weeks.