Rainbow Six Siege Devs Want to Go Free-to-Play Someday

Rainbow Six Siege could be switching to a free-to-play model.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Rainbow Six Siege director Leroy Athanassoff said that he and the rest of the development team support the idea.

"It's a company decision," Athanassoff said. "I think on the development team we want that at some point. We want the game to be accessible to everyone."

Although Athanassoff wants the change to happen, he also recognizes the challenges that come with moving to a completely free-to-play model, citing specifically problems around smurfing, a practice when experienced players create new accounts to play against lesser-skilled players.

"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," Athanassoff said. "The problem right now is that you can play a certain amount of matches with Copper players while you're a Diamond."

The Siege development team thinks the solution lies somewhere in taking more statistics into account and reacting to skill gaps faster. Currently, Siege's ranking system uses a player's win rate when matchmaking; increased stats would help create a more complex picture when addressing the problems free-to-play games have with smurfing.

Rainbow Six Siege is enjoying a bit of popularity boost at the moment. On Monday, the game set a new concurrent player record on Steam, hitting more than 178,000 players on Steam Charts. This new peak breaks the previous record of 176,206 in March 2018 after the release of the Operation Chimera update.