Rainbow Six Siege just hit an all-time high player count

Yesterday Ubisoft launched the third season of content for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and it’s already already paying dividends. The game’s three-year pass is coming in at number two on the Steam top-sellers list and, according to SteamCharts, player counts are at an all-time high. It’s a remarkable surge for a game first released to middling reviews in 2015.

SteamCharts recorded a high of more than 176,000 players. That’s up from just over 47,000 players one year ago.

The first batch of content for season three revolves around Operation Chimera, a Team Rainbow mission to contain a parasitic infection in a remote town in New Mexico. It includes two new playable characters, Frenchman Lion and Russian Finka, who are both veterans of anti-biological operations in the past. Both are playable in co-operative and competitive game modes.

This season also includes a new co-op mode called Outbreak. It’s a story-driven set of missions, and pits up to three players against a zombie horde in tense close-quarters battles.

The new season includes new equipment and skins, as well as a host of balancing tweaks and bug fixes.

Ubisoft is also enjoying a lot of goodwill from its community with the announcement that it will be handing out permanent bans for players who use hate speech on PC. With a long-term focus on gameplay and quality-of-life improvements, Siege has been able to double its peak and average users on Steam.