For half a decade now, Rainbow Six Siege has continued its support without a hitch. It’s on the verge of its newest season, which you can read more about here, and the game’s player count only goes up with each year. It’s one of the game’s you can point to as how the live service model can be great if done right. And it seems that, eventually, the game’s Director wants to see it accessible to as many people as possible.
In talking to PC Gamer, Director Leroy Athanassoff stated that he and the development team wanted to see the game go free-to-play. “It’s a company decision. I think on the development team we want that at some point. We want the game to be accessible to everyone,” he said. Athanassoff does acknowledge it could be problematic, though, and certain issues would need to be addressed. For instance, things like smurfing (where high-level players create new accounts to play against low-level, new players) will need to be curved in some way, since making the game free will potentially make a problem such as that even worse.
The logic does follow in the long term. While the game continues to sell, and we already know a port will hit for next gen consoles, at some point in time everyone who is willing to pay money for Siege will have done so. But considering the success of the game so far, I doubt it’ll be anytime soon.
