Rainbow Six Siege X drops most expensive skin ever and slows currency gain immediately after new free-to-play launch

Ubisoft’s new free-to-play re-launch Rainbow Six Siege X is here, lowering the barrier of entry for the studio’s popular PvP game. Unfortunately, that free-to-play shift has immediately resulted in the game dropping its most expensive skin ever. Woo, modern video games. 

Rainbow Six Siege X’s grubby monetisation 

After a literal decade of pushing its monetisation forward bit-by-bit, Rainbow Six Siege X is now a fully free-to-play title. You can start the game for nothing at all, and Ubisoft has made a whole bunch of gameplay improvements for the new launch, but the stench of monetisation is already smoking up the joint. 

Alongside the free-to-play shift, Ubisoft has introduced a new level of cosmetics: Masterpiece. Starting with the most expensive skin the game has ever seen, the $50 (yes, actually) Valkyrie Quintessence of Form skin, the game’s monetisation has skyrocketed. 

These skins can only be purchased through paid Rainbow Six Credits, a premium currency that you can use for skins and myriad items across the game. However, there are cosmetics and other goodies available for the game’s other currency, Renown. Unfortunately, Ubisoft has significantly slowed down how fast players can earn this currency, even for longtime players of the previous paid release. 

In the past, players were handed out Renown in the hundreds with even more if they used a booster. In Rainbow Six Siege X, the amount of Renown handed out in a single match has been reduced by as much as 300%. 

Renown is based on how well a player performs during a given match with top players used to getting a whole heap of currency for being the best of the best. In the new version of the game, one player shared that they earned just 108 Renown for a full game win of Dual Front, and that’s with the game’s 30% booster on. 

To put this into perspective, one of the biggest reasons to earn Renown is to unlock new Operators to play as in the game. An Operator in Rainbow Six Siege X costs 25,000 Renown, which didn’t take all that long to grind out in the past. Players could unlock an Operator in around 80 matches without boosters if they were just okay at the game. Now, that’s been pushed to 231 matches for players who are good at the game and have boosters enabled. 

This level of monetisation simply makes Ubisoft’s Rainbow Siege Six worse than it was before it donned its new “X” moniker. As we’ve all learned from Twitter, the X means it’s worse in every damn way. 

Considering the large amount of pushback from the game’s community that’s been keeping it alive for the past decade, we hope that Ubisoft will return Renown progression back to its previous speed. Will the company stop making extremely expensive cosmetics for the game? Absolutely not. This is the company that keeps putting battle passes in Assassin’s Creed. Can’t win ‘em all.   

About the Author

Lewis White

Lewis White is a veteran games journalist with a decade of experience writing news, reviews, features and investigative pieces about game development with a focus on Halo and Xbox.