Ubisoft’s terrorist vs counter-terrorist multiplayer shooter delights in breaking down doors, shooting up ceilings, and blowing away walls – but in its first week of release, it’s yet to make a dent on Steam’s player count list. The latest figures from Valve indicate that Siege is attracting a peak daily player count of 10,000, putting it 36th in the overall rankings. That’s just above Age of Empires II: HD Edition, and some way below Borderlands 2.
Wanna stop worrying about sales figures and just shoot stuff? Best get yourself to our best PC shooters, then.
It’s important to factor in that many of Siege’s players are playing via Ubisoft’s own PC distribution platform, the perpetual delight that is UPlay (real talk: it’s better than it was). UPlay doesn’t release stats of this kind like Valve do, so it’s not currently possible to get an accurate acculumated figure for Siege’s total PC player count.
However, you’d imagine that Ubisoft themselves would have expected Siege – which, based on my very limited in-game time, is great – would be attracting more players than Counter-Strike: Source. Not Global Offensive, although some may have dared to dream. We’re talking about CS: Source, released during the breakup of Pangea in the early Mesozoic era.
Steam’s stats have the game down for 4,611 players at the time I’m writing this, and a daily peak of 9,414. However, Steam user reviews are overwhelmingly positive, with many gamers praising the environmental destruction, map design and PC optimisation. That’s a sentiment I seconded in our own Rainbow Six Siege PC port review.
However, some users experienced problems launching the game via Steam (which then takes you to UPlay), so it’s possible that potential Spetsnaz operatives have been put off by that. Never fear though, we’ve got a fix for it in that same port review I just linked. Just up there, look. Yep, that one.
My personal take on it, since you ask, is that it’s more likely to be an indication of UPlay’s successful interception of players from Steam than the game performing poorly. That said, I would like to see it inch up the Steam stats list in the coming weeks and months, because there’s a huge amount of potential in Siege – enough to sustain popularity on both platforms.