The life-cycle of your average game is simple: A lively launch, a sharp dip in the number of players in the following weeks, followed by a long, slow decline, punctuated by slight bumps coming from sales, free weekends or coverage by major Youtubers.
Someone forgot to tell Rainbow Six Siege. After a ropey launch, most predicted the game would die a swift death. Instead, it’s gone from strength to strength, and this week, following the launch of the Operation White Noise update, it hit a massive new peak for concurrent players on Steam as recorded by Steamcharts: The big 100k.
From also-ran to rubbing shoulders with the likes of Counter-Strike. Who knows what’ll be joining our shortlist of must-play FPS’s in 2018.
Keep in mind that as impressive as that figure is by itself, many players of Siege are logging in to the game direct via Ubisoft’s own launcher/storefront Uplay, meaning that the real figure is likely to be significantly higher, so it’s doing exceptionally well for any multiplayer FPS. Our Jordan Forward was at the Rainbow Six Siege Year 2 world championships, and got to interview Ubisoft’s Alexandre Remy on their plans for the future, and how the studio pulled the game out of what looked like a fatal tailspin.
It seems inevitable that Siege’s popularity will only grow from here. Ubisoft have detailed their exact plans for the entire next year of the game, and have already committed themselves to support it through 2019 as well. I’m personally predicting that we’ll see another big spike in active players around the start of Year 3, Season 1 in Spring, which will be bringing a rather zombie-ish sounding time limited co-op event to the game.
While it seems unlikely that the game will ever reach the kind of absurd audience figures as the likes of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (it is a quite technical and complex team shooter, after all), how do you reckon time will treat Ubisoft’s rising FPS phoenix? Sound off in the comments below.