The game developer/publisher Ubisoft released a game based off of the Rainbow Six novels by Tom Clancy in 1998. Almost 22 years later, they are on their 17th installment in the series, Rainbow Six Siege (Released 2015).

Siege is a first-person tactical team based shooter with unique playable characters called operators that changes the dynamic of game play. With the release of the last installment, It quickly grew a fan base, but upon release the game was very unstable and for some unplayable.

The game is now in its fifth year and its player count has reached a count of 50 million as of September 2019. To make this possible Ubisoft had to take drastic measures to save their game.

Brief History

Before the games release, those who signed up to play the game before it was released had a chance to play the first iteration of the game. It had very smooth mechanics that had never been executed as well as Rainbow Six did. Such as leaning when aiming down sights or the destructible maps that make every match played feel different from the last.

It gave players a breath of fresh air in the FPS genre. With the game released in 2015, it looked drastically different than the early access version but came with its problems. Between game breaking glitches, like falling into a dark abyss below the map when loading in or not being able to connect with other players for up to an hour. Even with its problems the community still stuck around and played through the bad times, including myself, for the first few months after release.

Ubisoft’s vision was every few months they would add a ‘operation’ with new operators. But as Ubisoft continued to release more content it was apparent something needed to be done to fix the issues of the game.

This is where Ubisoft stepped in and stopped all development of new content a released ‘Operation Health’. Operation Health main purpose was to give the development team time to resolve the game breaking bugs and glitches of the game. This showed the community that Ubisoft cared for its game and little did they know they made a revolutionary decision.

Impact to the game industry

It was not uncommon for game development companies to release patches or bug fixes for their games. It was also very common for game developers to release a broken game and do nothing because they cashed out and completely abandoned their game due to not having enough revenue to pay developers.

Additionally, instead of abandoning the game they will go out their way to create a sequel to redeem themselves.

But Rainbow Six was unique in this situation, the game was high in sales and they could have simply left the game the way it was. The game was primarily multiplayer and would not be feasible to rebuild a game that was already years into its development.

Ubisoft set an example for game companies with it’s approach to live service business model. This means keeping players engaged long after release, its main purpose is to keep players around in the hope that they will buy micro transactions.

They were very clever in their model, their live service primarily consists of cosmetic items or new playable operators that force you to change your game play style. Now this may seem like a cash grab scheme, which it can be but Ubisoft took this approach with the games dynamic in mind.

They knew from the start they wanted the game to stay and compete with big competitive titles such as CS:GO and now it is reaching its fifth year and doing better than ever. Currently, we are seeing more games than ever before coming out with these live services and I truly believe it is all thanks to Ubisoft.