Rainbow Six Extraction was revealed last week, and it made my week. It’s a fantastic, fully realised version of the event that was first featured in Rainbow Six Siege. Whilst watching all the videos for the game, I couldn’t help but think what would happen if it was free-to-play. Unfortunately, it isn’t, but Ubisoft could do a lot by making it free-to-play before it comes out. After all, Rainbow Six Siege would have done just as well if it was the same now, it’s just that Ubisoft can’t ake that U-turn this late in the day.
Free-to-play games are given a lot more slack when it comes to bugs and glitches because there’s no initial buy-in. You get a free game, and therefore you’ll overlook some of the flaws in that free game. After all, you’d have no game otherwise. With a premium game though, you expect a certain level of quality and polish, and that’s where multiplayer based games get it wrong all the time. Any issues with glitches, or even just the fun you can have with the game, are overly criticised. It becomes a horrible community to start with, and takes a year of patches before the game is in the state it should have been at launch.
Ubisoft is doing what it’s always done. Launching games for full-price and expecting fans to purchase them because the company has a track record of producing good stuff. No one thinks about what Rainbow Six Siege was like at launch though. Everyone hated it, and it barely survived. The only reason it did is because Ubisoft had poured too much money into it to let it die. The game needed to make back its development costs, and Ubisoft worked with the community to make that possible.
I don’t think Rainbow Six Extraction should be a game you pay for. It’s going to have tonnes of in-game microtransactions, so it should be free from day one. I can already see the fallout from players picking it up on day one, and while I may well be one of them, I’ll never agree with paying money for this title unless it’s for a battle pass.
