'Rainbow Six Siege' News: Hits All-Time High Player Count on Steam
"Rainbow Six Siege" may have just had its best day ever, and it happened nearly three years after it was first released.
This week saw Ubisoft release the third season of content for "Rainbow Six Siege," and it seems that it has drawn in a lot more players than usual. According to Steam Charts, Ubisoft's tactical shooter reached a new peak of over 170,000 concurrent players right around the time the new season started. The Season Pass for the upcoming year also made it to the top 5 ranks on Steam's top sellers list.
To kick off the third year, Ubisoft rolled out Operation Chimera. As usual, this operation adds two new attacking operators, Finka and Lion. Both are members of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear (CBRN) Threat Unit, a special division of Team Rainbow that specializes in biochemical warfare.
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Something new to the game is Outbreak, a special limited-time cooperative mode that has teams of three going up against hordes of infected citizens called Roaches (though they might as well just be zombies). It serves as a nice diversion from the typical matchmaking that players have had for the past three years and serves to create more story and interaction between the different operators.
Outbreak may have caused a few retired veterans to try the game out one more time as it offers something new and fresh.
But perhaps the biggest change with the third season, and the one that may have drawn in a lot of new players, is that everyone now has access to the original 20 operators that came with the game when it first launched.
Before this update, players would have to purchase operators through in-game currency which, admittedly, can be a bit daunting and feel grindy. With this change, "Rainbow Six Siege" is now more accessible than ever to newcomers.
It should be said that these numbers only apply to the Steam version of the game. Just as many, if not more, PC players purchased the game directly through Ubisoft's own Uplay, and there are console players to take into account as well. Last year, Ubisoft claimed that over 2 million unique players log in on a daily basis, and it seems that the number is just destined to go up.
