Ubisoft backpaddles on Rainbow Six Siege censorship Update

Only a few weeks after Ubisoft announced that their popular multiplayer shooter Rainbow Six Siege was getting an “aesthetic change” update, the publisher today announced their decision to revert their plans. This comes after the initial update was received by the gaming community as a censorship update to conform to the Chinese market.

Publishers make mistakes all the time. That’s to be expected but it becomes especially fascinating when some of them could be so easily averted. Case in point, Ubisoft’s decision to implement the new Chinese censored version of Rainbow Six Siege across all regions globally. Despite knee-jerk reactions and exaggerated conspiracies that Ubisoft “bowed down to the Chinese regime”, the real reason behind the controversial update was one of development ease.

As Ubisoft very clearly explained two weeks ago, having only one unified version of Rainbow Six Siege makes life much easier for the developers to balance, improve and add content to their game. A very logical reason. But fans weren’t having none of that. Upon the news, Rainbow Six Siege got slammed in a wave of negative reviews on Steam. Even the player counts took a very slight hit during the controversy.

We will begin reverting these changes alongside the launch of Wind Bastion so no player is impacted; we ask you to be patient if some elements remain. We will carefully remove them all to the best of our ability considering the short timeframe and with the lowest impact on the season’s launch date and our build stability. – Ubisoft

Unsurprisingly, Ubisoft quickly took notice of the community pushback and today announces the full reversal of the global censorship update. Together with the next big update, Rainbow Six Siege will return to its pre-censored state for gamers worldwide.

And just as fast as Rainbow Six Siege was review-bombed, the tides have turned with the community voicing their satisfaction and also victory. Gamers are a fickle bunch and this case proves that publishers and developers really need to assess the mood and opinions of their target audience very closely to avert crisis.