Rainbow Six Siege is in the middle of its biggest-ever drop in players. According to Steamcharts, Ubisoft’s tactical shooter has seen its average player count drop by nearly 13,000 over the past 30 days.
Here’s the bizarre tale of how Tom Clancy sold his name to videogames.
In March, the beginning of Operation Chimera and the arrival of the Outbreak single-player campaign saw numbers spike by more than 20%. The average player count across the month was in excess of 83,000, while at its peak there were 176,000 people playing on Steam – the highest total ever.
Since then, however, the number of people playing on the platform has dropped rapidly. Over the past 30 days, the peak player count has been down by more than 30,000, and the average number is down by nearly 16%, sitting at just over 70,000 players. That’s far from an unhealthy figure, and it’s worth noting that the game also has a healthy console population, but it’s still the biggest drop the game has ever seen by around 8,000 players. Not great for a game that recently celebrated 30 million players.
There are a few reasons why the player base might have suffered. The spike we saw last month is likely to have been a lot of players logging in just to try out Outbreak and the new operators, and then going away again. But those operators could be the problem too – Lion and Finka have proved pretty unpopular so far, and that could be why players are leaving in droves.