Rainbow Six Siege on the offensive as Xbox player count booms
Rainbow Six Siege may be over seven years old, but that doesn’t seem to be hurting the competitive shooter’s player base. In fact, our data shows that weekly Xbox player counts have actually doubled since this time last year.
Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege is a regular on our weekly Xbox Gameplay Chart — in the 230 weeks the chart has been running, the tactical team-based shooter has never once dropped out of the top 20 most-played Xbox games on any given week, and it can typically been found staking out the top 10 from just outside. This week, however, Siege has managed to push into the hotly contested top five for the first time in almost three years, with a massive boost in Xbox players late last year carrying over with impressive week-on-week consistency to help it gradually gain ground while other popular games rise and fall around it. This is all based on the data we use to power our weekly Xbox Gameplay Charts, which take a sample pool of around 2.5 million active Xbox accounts and track which have played which games in any given week, making for a decent cross-section of gaming activity to give a fair idea of the current state of play.
Rainbow Six Siege: Seven years in and still going strong
A fair few things have happened since late last year to support Siege’s assault on the most popular Xbox games on the market, so let’s start by rewinding to December 2022. With the arrival of the Operation Solar Raid update and the final season of Year 7, Siege also featured in back-to-back Free Play Days weekends with an extended free campaign that spanned both to ring in the new season. This chunky update also brought with it some key new features, including cross-play and cross-progression which, in tandem with Siege being among the best games on Game Pass, meant subscribers who own the multiplayer FPS on any platform could now play on Xbox with all of their unlocks and stats intact.
Over the course of December, Rainbow Six Siege’s Xbox player count steadily grew and grew, rising by almost 50% by the end of the month and still on the up as 2023 rolled around. The player base has a history of rising and falling fairly dramatically and frequently, but things like new seasons and Operators, Free Play Days appearances, and other free periods tend to fuel these resurgences, and this latest one is its strongest and most consistent in years. This time last year, Siege was in a bit of a lull, showing up on just 4.5% of Xbox accounts in our sample pool that week — last week’s data sees that stat spike up to almost 8% and with more than double the player count, which checks out since our current pool uses even more accounts than back then. It’s that consistency that has helped it creep up the chart, however, with games like Destiny 2 and Forza Horizon 5 around it seeing much more volatility in their player bases from large boosts from new content then large drops in the following weeks as that content dries up. Siege, meanwhile, really hasn’t varied by more than a few thousand Xbox players at all in the last couple of months, so all it took was for players to move on from those swingier titles (as we’ve seen recently with players starting to move on from Lightfall and Rally Adventure respectively for the two example games) for the Clancy shooter to quietly advance up the rankings.
With some pretty big games coming to Game Pass in the coming weeks and months, Siege will have some stiff competition with which to contend, although if it can maintain the kinds of numbers we’ve been seeing since last month when Operation Commanding Force dropped, there looks to be little danger of it falling out of the top ten any time soon. What do you make of the ongoing success of Rainbow Six Siege? Let us know down in the comments!
