Rainbow Six: Siege Has Quietly Become A Huge Hit

Ubisoft's revival of Rainbow Six launched late last year just after the Black Friday rush for home consoles and PC. The game seemed to have a quiet launch, with a slow start out of the gate, but its tail end seems to be growing the longer it stays on the market, becoming a huge hit in the process.

IGN is reporting that Ubisoft sent them some numbers about Rainbow Six: Siege that indicates that the newest entry in the long-running series has steadily increased its worth over the nine or so months it's been on the market.

According to IGN, Ubisoft has expressed to them that Rainbow Six: Siege has a 40% daily active user increase following the recent release of the Skull Rain DLC compared to when the game first launched. That is actually extremely impressive.

The reason it's impressive is because multiplayer-only games usually see a 40% (and much higher) decrease after close to a year on the market. A perfect example of this is Evolve, which had a big, hyped up launch back in early 2015 for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC, but it ended up dropping down to barely 100 users a day before Turtlerock Studios and 2K Games re-launched Evolve as Evolve: Stage 2 and made it free-to-play, at which point they were able to boost the player count up to 40,000 a day, and then peter out with an average of 15,000 DAUs.

In the case of Rainbow Six: Siege, the chart actually seems to show that the game's launch month was around 48% DAUs (and I have no idea what this percentage is in comparison to or how it relates to actual player figures, since the Ubisoft chart does not show actual player usage figures) and after the Black Ice DLC went live it was close to 90% DAUs, just before dropping down to around 76% when the Operation Dust Line DLC launched. For Operation Skull Rain Rainbow Six: Siege went all the way up to 99% DAUs.

Again, the percentage doesn't make any sense because what is 100% daily active users? Everyone who owns the game? Everyone who played it when it was in the beta? The figure is vague and ambiguous and doesn't really tell us how many players are actually engaged in Rainbow Six: Siege or what the actual sales figures are. For all we know the 100% scale could relate to only the people who bought all of the DLC and the game itself, so that could be a much smaller pool of players than just the overall player base. I'm also curious how this factors in people who bought the game used but then also bought the DLC separately?

Anyway, crazy figures aside, Ubisoft has been consistently trying to improve and update the user experience for Rainbow Six: Siege.

IGN finishes up their report by noting that thousands of cheaters have been banned in the game and that the new Battle-Eye cheat detection system has been used to weed out a lot of botters, hackers and scumbags trying to ruin the game for everybody else.

Cheaters were one of the bigger complaints for Rainbow Six: Siege last year, so the increase in security with the consistent roll out of new content could have been enough to draw in new players or pull older players back in, thereby helping the user numbers grow.