Rainbow Six Siege Player Base Explodes to Record Highs With Operation Chimera Launch

Most games will launch with a big marketing push, a lot of hype, and then die down shortly after release. It's not uncommon to see concurrent player counts drop by 40-60% in the weeks and years following the launch of a highly-anticipated game, but Rainbow Six Siege has seen concurrent player patterns trend in the opposite direction. With the recent launch of Operation Chimera, Rainbow Six Siege's concurrent player count on PC has skyrocketed to record-high numbers, which is astounding.

If you head over to the Steam Stats page here, you'll see the top games by current player count toward the bottom. Rainbow Six Siege is boasting a recent concurrent player peak of over 176,000 players. For reference, at launch (when you would expect the most players to be playing), Siege saw an average concurrent player count of around 20,000 players. Since then, Ubisoft has expanded its player-base on PC almost eight-fold. We're willing to bet that Ubisoft has enjoyed similar growth on consoles as well.

There's very little disagreement these days that Ubisoft is leading the pack when it comes to structuring games as a service. A year ago we may have been cynically sneered over a publisher's ambition to make a single game last for years because, surely, the monetization of new content would rip the player-base apart, right? Not so. Rainbow Six Siege has been improving constantly, and all players have the opportunity to play new maps, earn new operators, and participate in unique events.

Operation Chimera is a great example of this. This new season of Rainbow Six Siege is available to all players, and with it debuts a new co-op game mode called Outbreak. Players have described Outbreak as Rainbow Six meets Left 4 Dead, and honestly, that's the best thing we've ever heard. Players band together and select from a small pool of operators to take on waves of alien creatures that are taking over a small town. It's dark, eerie, and it's different. Ubisoft is keeping things fresh, and it's making sure that everyone can partake in the thrill of novelty.