Rainbow Six Siege May Go Free-to-Play in the Future

Michael Ruiz February 25, 2020 12:30 PM EST

In a recent interview with Rainbow Six Siege director Leroy Athanassoff, he discusses the potential of the shooter to switch to a free-to-play model.

In the past five years, Ubisoft has continued its support of its tactical shooter, Rainbow Six Siege, and has benefited because of it. Now with over 55 million registered players, the developer wants to further expand that with a free-to-play version of the game.

According to an interview with PCGamesN, Rainbow Six Siege director, Leroy Athanassoff, stated that the team does want to see the game go free-to-play in the future. However, there are some hurdles they have to tackle first before they really think about going that route.

“I think on the development team, we want that at some point,” says Athanassoff. “We want the game to be accessible to everyone.”

The previously mentioned hurdles include a solution to highly-skilled players creating new accounts to exploit Rainbow Six Siege‘s ranked-based matchmaking. Athanassoff also states that going free-to-play is “a company decision,” so they can’t really just make that switch right now.

“What’s important for us is that we find out as soon as possible that a player is highly skilled in the things that matter,” says Athanassoff about its ranked-based matchmaking. “The problem right now is that you can play a certain amount of matches with copper[-ranked] players while you’re a diamond.”

Rainbow Six Siege is available currently available for Xbox One, PS4, and PC, which is already a pretty big player-pool to pull from. Making it free-to-play will only get more people on board with checking out Ubisoft’s shooter. Although, it may be some time before we see the game make the switch as they have discussed bringing the game to next-gen platforms, as well as being able to migrate your version of Siege (if you’ve purchased it) so that it will be as cheap as possible. It seems like a perfect match for the Xbox Series X’s Smart Delivery feature.

If you want to see what Rainbow Six Siege has in store for the very near future, you can check out our guide for its Year 5, Season 1 update, Void Edge. Like many of the content updates before it, this will bring two new operators and a map rework to the game.