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Rainbow Six: Siege Breaks 100k Concurrent Players on Steam for the First Time

After a Rough Start, Ubisoft's Strategic Shooter is Now Growing Bigger and Bigger

December 9, 2017 by

After only managing to bring in a peak of 12k concurrent players during its first weekend, Rainbow Six: Siege‘s launch on Steam back in December 2015 was underwhelming to say the least.

With the player counts dropping after its first week, things didn’t look good for the squad-based shooter. And to make matters worse, Ubisoft’s own upcoming launch of The Division shifted most of the publisher’s marketing focus to promoting the more highly anticipated of the two Tom Clancy shooters.

But while The Division‘s player base started with over 100k players and overshadowed Rainbow Six, it quickly lost 93% of them 3 months after launch. Now, two years later, Siege has become Ubisoft’s flagship shooter and is on the heels of surpassing The Division‘s all-time peak after hitting 100,048 concurrent players this weekend on Steam.

Rainbow Six: Siege’s Peak Player Counts on Steam via GitHyp

Siege‘s success is due to a combination of factors, many of which Ubisoft hasn’t been able to successfully pull off in any of their other recent multiplayer games. Free-to-play weekends have enticed new players, while constant waves of new updates and characters such as this weekend’s ‘Operation White Noise’ have been enough to keep players around.

Although Rainbow Six: Siege started as a full priced $60 game, Ubisoft made the clever decision to adopt a free-to-play model with a hybrid season pass system to reduce the game’s barrier to entry. Siege still costs $14.99 for the base game (which doesn’t include all of the Operator characters), but Ubisoft’s handling of the tiered systems has been embraced by the community with Very Positive recent and overall reviews on Steam.

The increase in Siege‘s player base has even been enough to help it surpass Team Fortress 2 and become the #4 most played game on Steam. But Rainbow Siege: Siege still has a long way to go before it topples Steam’s current top squad shooter, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which pulls in peaks of 400-500k concurrent players at #3 on Steam.