Last week, Ubisoft staged its big launch for Siege X, the long awaited expansion/upgrade to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. Ubisoft seemed incredibly generous at the time, by launching the game with a new free tier. But gamers are now alleging that Ubisoft’s perceived generosity came to an end, just a little over a week after launch.
As reported by Notebookcheck, the community has been openly complaining about the aggressive monetization that Ubisoft made in such a short time. We’ll run them down bit by bit.
The biggest point of contention is Renown, the in-game currency that you can earn by playing the game or by using real money. Notebookcheck linked to PC Gamer, who outlined these changes by the numbers.
One player earned 108 Renown after winning a game in Dual Front, and this was also using a 30 % booster. In another case, a player earned 177 Renown after winning an unranked match. As PC Gamer explains, these are reductions of earned Renown by as much as 200 to 300 %. It’s even worse if you lose matches, as you can get as low as 38 or even seven Renown. In contrast, a new Siege X operator costs 25,000 Renown.
Now, as harsh as these changes are, Ubisoft does offer an out. You can now earn 500 Renown for playing two matches a day, and 1,000 Renown for leveling up. These changes do make it easier to earn Renown after playing for a very short time. One could argue that this choice respects the players’ time, but of course, there’s another way to look at it. It incentivizes players to return and play every day, and the reason Siege X has changed like that is because Ubisoft wants to cite daily active users (DAUs) and monthly active users (MAUs) in their quarterly reports.
In other words, Ubisoft has proven our earlier report false, and turned Siege X into a genuine free-to-play game. But there’s another addition Ubisoft did that proverbially twisted the knife in even further, striking bone. They launched a new Valkyrie Paragon Elite bundle, featuring a new skin called Quintessence of Form. The bundle costs 5,000 R6 credits, or 4,500 R6 if you’re on Battle Pass.
R6 is different from Renown, and can only be bought with real money. If you wanted the bundle, you could be spending as much as $ 50. We already learned last week that Siege X’s free tier will really only let you access a minimum of content, including Operators and skins. But seeing Ubisoft want gamers to pay close to the price of a full game for a single bundle would read as greedy, because, of course, it is.
Suffice to say, this could tank Siege X, but Ubisoft seems willing to risk it all to see if they can get away with it. It’s certainly a huge contrast to their attitude surrounding XDefiant, but now, Ubisoft is going to see if Siege X’s loyal players will leave in droves – and if the free tier players will be enough to compensate and make this all worth it.
