As it struggles to find players, Ubisoft’s XDefiant will give you $9 in funbucks if you log in a few times over the next couple of weeks

Remember XDefiant? The sweaty, free-to-play COD-like from Ubisoft that—per Midcap Partners analyst Charles-Louis Planade—has struggled to find an audience since it came out last May? It’s understandably keen that you play it, and is offering around $9 (£8) in company scrip to anyone who shows up once a day in the game between now and September 24. 

Specifically, the game is offering daily login bonuses to anyone who boots up the game between the event’s beginning yesterday and September 24. Login today and you’ll get a weapon and battle pass XP boost. Tomorrow will net you 100 coins. There’s another XP boost after that, then more coins, and so on and so on until it all wraps up on the 24th with an XP boost/XCoin bundle. That’s 900 coins and 8 boosters total.

The perceptive among you will note that this promotion kicked off bang-on alongside the end of the Black Ops 6 beta, and I’m gonna go ahead and guess that’s not entirely a coincidence. XDefiant is, in the words of PC Gamer shooter czar Morgan Park, “as boots-on-the-ground, 2010-era CoD as it gets outside the Activision bubble.”

If it wants to reverse its reported slide in player numbers, it’s going to have to find a way to lure people’s attention away from the massive, COD-shaped fish it shares its FPS pond with (Yes, metaphors like that are why I’m paid the big bucks). Timing a promotional event like this one right at the end of COD-fever is no doubt an attempt to do just that.

I’ve got nothing against XDefiant, but I don’t know that it’ll work all that well. Its basic offering: A free-to-play, competent COD-like with no SBMM and a generally sweatier ethos, has never struck me as anything other than a niche offering to shooter players dissatisfied with the direction COD has taken. That strikes me as something that has a loyal but small cadre of fans rather than the kind of thing to pin shareholder hopes on.