Rainbow Six Siege Took esports Cues from Counter-Strike and MOBA’s

Rainbow Six Siege’s esports component recently reached a major milestone with last month’s inaugural Paris Major tournament, a tournament which served as the capstone for the 2017 Siege Invitational. Given how much Siege has grown over the three years since its launch, it’s no surprise that the game’s esports scene has grown with it, but what *is* surprising are the various other games and genres that Ubisoft drew from while shaping Siege’s esports format.

Rainbow Six Siege's esports scene had some surprising influences.

There’s no denying that Rainbow Six Siege is one of the most unique competitive shooter games on the market, and Ubisoft’s esports director François-Xavier Deniele was all too happy to reiterate that fact when he sat down with PC Gamer for an esports-centered interview. However, as Deniele himself put it, the influences of what other games had already done served as the foundation for what Siege would eventually become:

“It’s hard to say that we could’ve predicted being here three years ago. But even before the release of the game, before the rest of the world had played it, we knew we had something different from the competition. For example, what Counter-Strike is doing is great, it’s really good, but we wanted to propose something different.

When the production came back with the idea of: okay, we will create the perfect field between a shooter and a MOBA, and take the best argument for both; it was then: okay, let’s take the Rainbow Six brand and see where we can take it. It was really good to mix all of these ingredients together.”

Deniele also mirrored comments made by Ubisoft brand director Alexandre Remy, saying that the decision to make Siege into a purely multiplayer experience was tough, but also ultimately necessary:

“It’s always a question of balance. For the production team, it was a case of: okay, if we want to create a true competitive esports title, we need to focus on the multiplayer aspects. If you are creating operators and putting them into single-player—it’s not the same rules, you can’t do it.

Even from co-op to multiplayer, it’s not the same rules there either. Where we are truly different from other games, it’s the multiplayer. It’s as simple as that. It wasn’t an easy decision. It was a hard decision. But it was, I think, the right decision. We focused all the production, all the planning on these elements. It was all or nothing. I think it’s worked out okay.”

The full interview is definitely worth a read if you want some insights into how both Rainbow Six Siege and its esports component came to be. Meanwhile, whether you’re a fan of Siege’s esports component or not, you can currently score some sweet Twitch-themed in-game items if you happen to be a Twitch Prime member.