Rainbow Six Siege director wants it to go free-to-play one day

The Rainbow Six Siege development team at Ubisoft Montréal wants the title to go free-to-play one day, according to game director Leroy Athanassoff.

But in order for that to be possible, certain features would need to be in place, and ultimately “it’s a company decision”, he told PC Gamer.

“I think on the development team we want that at some point,” he said of the tactical shooter potentially going free-to-play. “We want the game to be accessible to everyone.

“You need certain features ready to be a good and successful free-to-play game,” he added, explaining that the team is trying to identify the best solution to combat skilled players using secondary accounts in order to take advantage of less-skilled ones.

“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.”

Athanassoff recently said Ubisoft intends to release Rainbow Six Siege for PS5 and Xbox Series X when the next-gen consoles launch later this year.

He also confirmed that current and next-gen players within console families will be able to play against each other, and said Ubisoft would like to support cross-play between Microsoft and Sony systems.

“We are ready to support that,” he told Windows Central. “And hopefully, this will happen because as I said, it’s a general move in the industry, and there is nothing that can prevent that. It’s just a matter of time before it happens.”

Ubisoft has previously spoken of not wanting to fragment the Rainbow Six Siege player base, which reached 50 million in September 2019, according to the company.