How Many People Still Play Rainbow Six Siege In 2021?

As one of the biggest success stories of the last decade, Rainbow Six Siege overcame its rough early days to reach massive success in the years since. But how many people still play Rainbow Six Siege in 2021?

Released in late 2015, Rainbow Six Siege suffered from a launch that was plagued by technical issues, which tends to be par for the course for not just Ubisoft games, but pretty much every AAA multiplayer game these days. After they worked hard to turn the ship around, Rainbow Six Siege didn’t exactly explode into life, but grew and grew over the years thanks to constant content updates and positive word of mouth.

Countless seasons, maps and new Operators later, Rainbow Six Siege is arguably in its healthiest spot ever with a strong playerbase and a great future ahead. It’s the most popular Rainbow Six game in history and is among the most played FPS games of the last decade — and maybe all time.

If you need any more proof of just how popular Rainbow Six Siege is in 2021, as well as how promising its future is, here’s everything you need to know about Siege’s active players, concurrent peaks, and what we have to look forward to.

 

Rainbow Six Siege Active & Concurrent Player Figures

Rainbow Six Siege is probably about as far from a “dead game” as you can get, and really, it’s never been anywhere close to struggling. Even during its rough early days, it enjoyed some solid figures that most multiplayer games could only dream of.

In its launch month in December 2015, Siege boasted peak player figures of 18,130 on Steam with its lowest ever count coming in March 2016 with 11,234 players and 6,125 players on average. Those aren’t bad player figures by any stretch of the imagination.

In March 2021, Siege stormed to 85,157 players on average, and 199,830 peak players, its highest ever record that will almost certainly get shattered again at some point in the future.

To put these player figures into perspective, five years after launch, Rainbow Six Siege is more than ten times more popular than it was during its earliest days. The vast majority of multiplayer games tend to land hot and then plateau very quickly, so Siege is definitely an outlier as a game that keeps growing instead of fading. Really, it’s right up there with Among Us in terms of turnaround successes. And these figures are for PC only, there are doubtless thousands more playing at any given time on PlayStation and Xbox.

If you need more proof, check out this video on the most popular Steam games below between 2015 and 2020.

Notice how Siege surges up and up over the years, going into the top ten most played games in 2017 and barely moving out of it since. By the end of 2020, Siege had even become one of the most reviewed games on Steam of all time, and has 750,000 reviews as of this writing for a Very Positive overall rating.

Granted, Siege’s Standard Edition dropping in price pretty steeply over the years has helped it quite a lot, as has the sheer amount of free weekends it’s enjoyed. However, even if you take those away, there’s no doubt it would still be riding high in Steam charts.

Make no mistake: in terms of sheer numbers, Siege is as far from dying as a game can really get.

 

Rainbow Six Siege On Twitch & YouTube

How is Rainbow Six Siege faring when it comes to viewership, though? A lot of people tend to use Twitch and YouTube as a barometer of how popular a game is, but that can often be misleading — some games just aren’t a good fit for streaming and content creation in general.

Well, that’s not really the case with Rainbow Six Siege. As of this writing, Rainbow Six Siege is always in the top 20 most watched games on Twitch, and while that doesn’t seem to be an absolute reflection of its general popularity, its pretty close. It’s been a while since Siege reached its peak viewership on Twitch in 2018 with 253,535 concurrent viewers, but any game that can hit 20K+ viewers on average is inarguably doing great.

However, there’s one thing that tends to send Siege rocketing up the Twitch and YouTube charts: eSports. Siege hit 121,505 peak viewers just for European League 2021 Stage 1 . That’s just the start of a tournament, so you can imagine that that number will only swell the deeper into it we go.

Generally speaking, though, Siege does very well on YouTube and Twitch, regardless of any special events. Just like the game itself, Siege’s stature on YouTube and Twitch has grown steadily over time, but thanks to content creators like MeatyMarley and BikiniBodhi, as well as Ubisoft working to make Siege tournaments more exciting and watchable, it’s flourishing.

 

The Future of Rainbow Six Siege

If you’re wondering what the future of Rainbow Six Siege holds, barring some kind of disastrous misstep from Ubisoft, it should be more of the same success.

While there are probably those out there clamouring for a sequel, the reality is that Siege is going to be around for a long, long time yet. This is because Ubisoft themselves have said that they hope Siege to be around for at least ten years and reach 100 total Operators on the roster, meaning that it should be supported until 2025 at the very earliest. It’s hard to imagine the planet even still being here by then, but there it is.

There’s also the question of whether Siege even really needs a sequel, as any follow-up has the chance of ruining its magic formula and splitting the playerbase unnecessarily. This is where Overwatch 2 is at for a lot of people right now and while it’s admirable to push franchises in new directions, it doesn’t seem particularly necessary where Siege is concerned.

Instead, Ubisoft will likely keep doing what they’ve always done: new maps, reworks, and new Operators every few months to keep the experience fresh. However, Ubisoft seem to be keen on building a Siege universe and have the spin-offs to prove it.

Rainbow Six Quarantine (which is rumoured to be getting re-revealed as Rainbow Six Parasite sometime soon) is set to release as a story-rich PVE shooter set in the Siege universe that’s been spun off from Siege’s Outbreak event. At this time of writing, it may have been changed pretty dramatically from its initial reveal, but it will certainly scratch an itch for those wanting some more variety in their Rainbow Six.

So, while there may always be those doubting the game, the truth is that Siege is probably going to be besieging player charts for years to come. As long as the game keeps bringing new players in who inevitably use Fuze on Hostage, it will do just fine.

Rainbox Six Siege is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X | S.

READ NEXT: How Many People Still Play Apex Legends in 2021?