Rainbow Six Siege: From a Disastrous Launch to Ubi’s Golden Calf

In the ever-evolving and oversaturated genre of online videogame shooters, a new and up incoming title has to put all the effort into standing out from its competitors. The main goal and focus should be concentrated on creating an engaging gameplay experience and remaining relevant even long after release. Being a part of a long-running franchise with a rich history in a gaming world certainly might help, but it doesn’t necessarily solve all of your problems. Nowadays, as a developer and a publisher you cannot simply rely upon and live out of your well known and respected name. The online FPS (First Person Shooter) market is highly competitive and the lifespan of even the biggest AAA titles is highly dependent on post-release support from the development team as well as the game actually being interesting and addicting to keep putting your time into. Some of the more well-known and bestselling FPS shooter franchises like “Call of Duty” (Activision Blizzard) and “Battlefield” (EA) still struggle to keep up the player count on their servers, even with a stable DLC schedule and well-funded and researched long term support strategy. So how does a new title manage to survive and flourish long after its release? This article aims to answer this particular question by taking a closer look and dissecting the history behind “Rainbow Six Siege”, released on December 1st, 2015, as well as a brief overview of the franchise’s long-running story arc.

The history of the Rainbow Six franchise began back in 1998 with the release of Tom Clancy’s techno-thriller novel “Rainbow Six” that in the same year launched the release of the first game under the same name developed by Red Storm Entertainment studious. Both the novel and the game follow a team of a tier-one special forces unit under NATO supervision that combines all the best operatives from different nations tasked with counter-terrorism. The game qualifies itself as a strategic tactical shooter which puts more emphasis on a careful and mindful approach to each mission and demands players to develop a plan and manage their team on a mission.

The Rainbow Six series have gone through multiple iterations spanning across a variety of platforms, console, PC and even mobile all together amounting to 16 releases, some of them are more successful than the others. After having a fairly strong release for “Rainbow Six Vegas 2” in 2008, the series took hiatus trying to find its footing and identity, striving to re-invent the wheel and readjust the proven winning formula. In 2011 the developers came out with a pre-rendered gameplay trailer of “Rainbow 6 Patriots” that announced a revival of the series. Besides an obvious change from “Six” to a numeric “6” in the game title, this time the focus was heavily relying on innovative interactive storytelling mechanics and the moral aspects around the decision making in a day to day of a Rainbow Six operative. Sadly, the game was stuck in the development hell and never came into fruition. However, on the positive side, the failed to be released title gave birth to complete reimagining and reinstallment of the series with the next generation flagship that “Rainbow Six Siege” turned out to be.

“Rainbow Six Siege” was first announced in 2014 at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in LA as a part of a Ubisoft panel. The game appeared to be a multiplayer-only title which at the time was quite a bold move considering most AAA titles usually offer both a singleplayer and a multiplayer for the same price tag. The main selling point of the game was a new engine that supports an unprecedented level of destruction. Multiplayer maps now could be turned into shreds with floors, walls, and barricades — all being a possible entry point to surprise an unexpecting enemy team with a dramatic and explosive entrance. The game was praised by the critics at the expo and even received Game Critics Awards nomination as “Best of Show”. The community also was intrigued by the comeback of a seemingly disappeared and forgotten title, and although the gameplay trailer was mocked for bad, borderline cringy, acting as it tried to simulate in-game communication between players, the interest for the upcoming game was still there and the marketing hype began to grow stronger.

From the beginning it was apparent the Ubisoft took the development seriously as they had held a series of community testing phases with Pre-Alpha, Alpha and Beta stages of the game. However painful the process of finding a lobby to play a game during the testing might have been, the actual gameplay was fun and addictive, with high stakes and even higher TTK (Time to Kill), as there were no respawns and you could die from one single bullet to the cranium. Although the experience was a little be rough around the edges, both the developers and the community understood that they were onto something and possibly might have struck gold, even though it was still a long way from being a complete product. At the release, the game did quite poorly, with relatively low selling numbers and unimpressive player count and after a short honeymoon hands-on period with the game, the players have started to become frustrated with the certain aspects of the shooter. The game still felt unfinished, overrun with game-breaking bugs and blatant hackers. The party system did not work properly and needless to say, in a title that was solely based on coordinated teamwork with your friends, this was unacceptable. However, at the core, the gameplay was spectacular. Developers have managed to create an extremely unique experience, full of high-octane action, adrenaline rush and moments of pure satisfaction that left you longing for more.

So, what made Rainbow Six Siege survive the initial hardships of the launch and develop into flagship behemoth of a title that it became in 2020? Simply put, it was positioning the game as a service and having an open dialog with the community and its representatives.

The first step was for the publisher to figure out the way to monetize the game and decide on a certain economic model. The payment structure for gaming experience has evolved from what it once was and keeps evolving in accordance with the need of the market and us, the consumers. The initial model for making money of gamers was to simply create and sell games for profit, as a final and seldom finished product. However, the executives have noticed that this dynamic has the potential to be more lucrative, so the model went through its first step of evolution. The next best thing has become DLC content after release, which would increase the longevity of the game providing a variety of new maps, skins, weapons, etc. Each of those DLC packages would be put under a smaller price tag as an add on to the game, or group into a “Season Pass”, a term that was coined by gaming executives, and is much hated and frowned upon in gaming community. Season pass would essentially combine yet to be developed and released DLC content into one package with a fancy ribbon, an insufficient price discount, and few bonus cosmetic bonus items. These concepts are nothing new to the true and tested gamers, and Ubisoft is infamous of sticking to them to a degree, however this time, they managed to separate themselves from the pack of well-known online shooters (Battlefield, Call of Duty) by offering all post-release content for Rainbow Six Siege free of charge. That way they figured out that they can start turning heads in their direction in the relatively monopolized market that previously mentioned titles have cornered. The developers decided to monetize the game only through cosmetic items that didn’t provide any in-game performance benefits that could potentially turn the game into Pay to Win type of structure.

The second step was to establish trust and stable communication between the community and the development team. In the age of incredible abundance of content and variety of content creators on multiple platforms such as Twitch and YouTube, the industry has developed a standard for a symbiotic relationship between the content creators/influencers and videogame publishers. Creators get all the spotlight and perks from working with the big publisher, early access, game currency and on the rare occurrences are even being flown out to attend expos, parties and testing content. The publisher, on the other hand, gets all the free publicity and press community provides and reaps the benefits of the buzz that’s being generated for the game, eventually raising sales numbers and a player count. Ubisoft developers didn’t wait too long until the game has cultivated its loyal following and a number of community members with bright personalities, whether they were talented casual gamers creating video content/streaming, or the professional players that were looking to play at the highest levels of competition. At the beginning stages, the game didn’t even have the competitive structure and tournaments, with the first big event being held at the end of the first year since the release. For the reference, the total sum of the whole the prize pool for the very first competitive event for Siege was fifty thousand dollars, and as it stands now, the latest championship with the toughest level of competition that was held at the end of 2019, had a total sum amounting to staggering two million dollars.

Alongside the prestige status of a top eSports title, Rainbow Six Siege has accumulated a few other accolades such as a player count that has reached fifty-five million registered players spanning across current-gen consoles and PC, as well as climbing through the ranks of twitch viewership popularity to the 16th spot worldwide. One of the most important decisions that made such success possible can be attributed “Operation Health”. As mentioned before, to say that Siege had a rocky launch would be an understatement. Ubisoft simply didn’t anticipate the game’s rising popularity and the number of players that kept pouring in each month. At that time, the publisher had already posted a supposed “Road Map” for DLC content release that they had to adhere to. Be that as it may, the developers had a tough time following up on their promise, while sticking to the tight schedule without sacrificing the quality of the content being presented. So the decision had to be made, to notify the community that the release of DLC will be postponed, and the team first will be focusing on fixing everything that is wrong with the current state of the game and implementing certain tools. that would allow making the adjustments and deployment of fixes in the future far easier. Lo and behold, the community was reasonably upset, however, soon enough they came to terms with the decision, and have learned to appreciate and respect it. Eventually, the game has returned to the good graces of the community when the necessary changes were made to the build of the game to improve the overall experience.

Rainbow Six Siege grows in strides and evolves from year to year as a true representative of a game as a service model. All the highs and lows that the dev team and community went through in the past 5 years has allowed for an honest dialog and mutually beneficial relationships between the two parties. Recently, Ubisoft shared its ambition to support the game for at least 10 years and to eventually adopt a “Free to Play” model to make the game more accessible for a casual newcomer, with enough generated content to pull gamers in for hundreds and thousands of hours of gaming. Through Rainbow Six Siege, the twenty years old monolith of a brand has managed to completely reshape itself, while staying true to the core values and protecting the unique qualities of its predecessors that made the game stand out in the first place. This online shooter genuinely provides one of the more thrilling and exciting experiences on the current market and the way the team had to go about to achieve such success, is a story to be preserved and passed on the next generations of developers and gamers alike, by the digital campfire in a pixel rich environment.