Over the weekend, Ubisoft announced that its long-running success Rainbow Six Siege would be receiving a monthly membership subscription. Despite the dedicated community that the game has built over the past eight-and-a-half years, the reception to the move has been anything but warm.
Instead, as PC Gamer reports, the R6 Membership has been getting universally dunked on since being announced at a tournament over the weekend. A video included in PC Gamer’s write-up shows a crowd actually booing Ubisoft, which can be seen again from another angle here.
The R6 Membership, which will run players $10 a month or $80 a year, comes with many of the basic trappings of similar optional subs. Upon buying into the membership, players will be given instant access to the ongoing season’s battle pass, be granted ten level skips to get ahead of the grind, and receive a Bravo pack, which is Siege’s equivalent to loot boxes. Every month, players will also be given ten more level skips and another Bravo pack on their renewal date. Finally, folks who subscribe to the sub will also get a cosmetic drop with one legendary item and whatever an Epic bundle might be on the 28th of each month.
There’s a decent amount of stuff there for the diehard fans of Siege, and the rest of the battle pass rewards also give out unique weapon and operator skins—as well as in-game currency to add value—but the timing of the sub couldn’t be worse. Siege is in the middle of its ninth year, which would be impressive if the current roadmap for the year hadn’t already let down players with its gaping lack of new content.
The roadmap for the next half year includes a lot of reworks to existing characters and systems, and while part of Siege’s plans for a long while, it’s not met with a wealth of new additions to keep fans happy. Such reworkings are, at this point, a staple of maintaining a live-service title. These games can’t always just throw in new maps, characters and abilities every season, and at some point that constant growth slows to account for the imbalances it all creates. Eventually whole systems and locations need to be reworked or completely overhauled.
The same has happened to games as big as League of Legends and Apex Legends, however most games don’t go most of the year with as few additions as Siege is making in 2024. It has added one new character, and Siege will add at least two more over the next few seasons, but the absolute bulk of “additions” coming for the rest of the year are changes to things that already exist in the game, which is beginning to become a sore spot for the community at the moment. And then here comes a bunch of new cosmetics, but they’re locked behind a new paywall.
To throw further fuel on the fire, subscriptions like this are commonplace in games that are otherwise free-to-play, like Fortnite, but Siege has remained a premium title over the years. The optics of a subscription containing new goodies in this drought of content for players who’ve otherwise already paid is undeniably bad, and you immediately get why people are pissed off.
Redditors are already calling to boycott the subscription, while others are simply reveling in the chaos. Siege’s upcoming season was detailed at the very same time as the announcement of the subscription, which has only worsened the reception to the former.
Kotaku has reached out to Ubisoft for a comment.