Rainbow Six Siege struggled when it launched in December 2015. It failed to generate much excitement and reviews were lukewarm. Fast forward 20 months and Siege is one of the biggest first-person shooters around. The turnaround, it seems, is complete. In a blog post, Ubisoft said 2.3 million people play Siege every day, which is an impressive number indeed. The game just hit the 20 million registered players mark, too. Now, I'm more interested in the 2.3 million daily players number, as that's a better indication of Siege's current health than the 20 million registered players figure (there was a beta and multiple free weekends and trials that will have inflated the latter). We don't have stats for PS4, Xbox One nor uPlay, but Steam gives us a concurrent player number, which at the time of publication is a healthy 28,743, with a 45,979 peak today. That makes Siege the 13th most-popular game on Steam right now, ahead of the likes of Rocket League, Skyrim and Fallout 4. How has Ubisoft done this? With solid post-launch support and a DLC plan that the company now tries to mimic across its competitive games. Rather than split the userbase, Siege makes all operators and maps available to all players. The original roster of 20 operators has expanded to 30, with 16 maps currently in the game. Ubisoft has also invested in Siege as an esport, with a pro league that's proving popular on Twitch. Ubisoft has spent recent months fixing various issues with the game and upgrading its tech with new servers in a bid to improve match stability. Now, thoughts turn to season three, which brings two operators from Hong Kong's Special Duties Unit (SDU), a new Operator from Poland's Grupa Reagowania Operacyjno-Manewrowego (GROM), a new map and new weapons. Source: Euro Gamer
Sounds like this game and its pro league could give the Call of Duty franchise and the CDWL a real challenge for the eSports world playoff.
