“We’ve been baptized in fire” – the new Rainbow Six boss on losing staff, Tencent, GTA and… Moana

0:00Joshua Mills: Right as soon as we launched, we needed to rest. We had to get the team some time to kind of recover from this. And then that caused a bit of a content wall that happened in the seasonal cadence. And that really hurt. We know something's coming along the lines. Like we've got a big one coming this year with GTA. Obviously, it doesn't matter what genre you're in, you're going to get hit. You have to think ahead and be like, okay, bring your expectations in line of what's going to go on there. People are going to go play and they'll come back and stuff like this. And heck, all of us are going to play.

0:26Joshua Mills: The question was like, why do Siege X and not do Siege 2? One of the big things is fundamentally rebuilding our entire system. It's a mountain of work to do and to nail it and to get it right and to be able to scale in the way we're doing. If we were to want to do something like this, Siege would have to essentially go on ice in order to do.

0:46Hello and welcome to the Game Business Show. This week's show is sponsored by Keyword Studios. Now Keywords is a real global company with 13 ,000 people across 26 countries. And what they do is they provide talent and expertise to studios to help them make their games, release their games, and make sure that they're supported long beyond that. They say they're supercharged by technology and shaped by long-term partnerships. And when it comes to that global impact, they help studios prepare games for more markets, languages, platforms, and launch windows. while crucially keeping quality context and control where they matter from localization planning and QA to localization QA and launch support keywords helps ensure meaning tone and release quality are protected at a global scale you can find out more on the keyword studios website or click the links in the newsletter connected with this show and now let's get back to that show this week's edition is once again about a major shooter series particular it's about Rainbow Six Siege.

1:51Now it launched nearly 11 years ago and last year it celebrated its 10th anniversary with the major update X which introduced a new game mode, modernized maps, various gameplay upgrades, audio and UI overhaul and loads of other things as well. It also introduced the ability for players to access the base game for free but it proved a challenging project. It led to a tired development team and a large number of people left the project. that included creative director alexander kapasis who handed the reins over to joshua mills who was previously the game director now i had a chance to chat with mills about rainbow six siege how it's doing today how his team plans to react to the launch of grand theft auto 6 the impact of siege major 2025 security breach and whether there will ever be a need for a rainbow six siege 2

2:40Joshua Mills: check it out hello josh welcome to the show hey man it's an honor to be here it's cool to be talking to you. So I appreciate it. Oh, wow. I love doing these interviews where I discover, I mean, I do know about Rainbow Six Siege. I was there 11 years ago when it launched. I did Warframe recently and Old School RuneScape. And I just thought, so fascinating because they're like different industries in their own little right. I find it really exciting doing these sort of interviews. It's funny because the team sent me, whenever they sent this over to me, they sent me the Warframe one you had done.

3:08Joshua Mills: And I was like, that's awesome because it's like, I'm originally from Ontario. So Digital Extremes was the thing back then. So it was really, really cool to see. And I still follow them to this day because it's incredible what they've done. MARK MANDELAVYSKI - Yeah, well, just plug in at it and keep going. That's kind of the way. Well, you've taken the creative director role on Rainbow Six Siege. MARK MANDELAVYSKI - Yes. MARK MANDELAVYSKI - Was it April you joined? Was it? Oh, not joined, but when you took that role? MARK MANDELAVYSKI - Publicly, we announced it at SI or a little before SI just this year.

3:36Joshua Mills: But the reality was I actually took the role in the shadows, or at least Ubisoft structure around September of last year. Oh, right. You've been doing it for a year. Yeah. So it's, oh man, I didn't even realize it's been a year now. Yeah. So beyond that, we mentioned in like a blog post we did where Capacis, like Alex Capacis and I got to kind of talk about the handover. The reality was I was shadowing Alex for some time, and this was something that was kind of on the books for a while. So when you got like full control, did you ring in the changes? Have you ripped up all the rule books? Okay, so I've, not just me, there's been a lot of, we have like a generational team.

4:13Joshua Mills: So this team on Siege has changed a lot over time, which has definitely brought new perspectives and different challenges. One of the things was when I joined the team, like, what was it, five years ago, about that now, everything that could have been challenged to say that, well, this is how it's done. It was like, well, let's talk about it, because it's been 10 years. Like, does it make sense at this point with like how the industry shifted, how our players have shifted? So I don't want to say ripping up the rule book, but definitely challenging decisions that may have been kind of stuck for a little bit.

4:41Joshua Mills: That hasn't changed. And then post Siege XL's launch, there were a bunch of challenges that we were being faced with and we had to adapt at that point. Well, I'll go ask about both of those things. So it's interesting. When I interviewed RuneScape recently, they've gone through the same thing. They've been going to be 20 odd years and they've gone through the whole thing where they've gone, right. Those decisions that we made in 2009, where we decided that that doesn't work, actually, is it in a different world now where that might work? Should we put a game on a console? Should we do that? You know, all of that, challenge all of the decisions that they made before, not because they were wrong in the first place, because when you're talking about a game that's been around for, in your case, nearly 11 years, things change.

5:17Players change. Behaviors change. Yeah, 100%.

5:19Joshua Mills: It's exactly that. Just challenge it. Open up the hood of the car, take a look at the engine, see if everything makes sense. And if it does, cool, keep it going forward, but then build it as part of your pillar going forward. And that was kind of the way we looked at it. I was going to ask about the X launch later on in the end two, but you brought it up already. Oh, sorry. No, no, no, it's great. How these things flow. So you talked about some challenges coming out of that. What ones are you talking about? I mean, there's multiple, because if we talk about just the sheer amount of work that we did as a team, basically we're running a live game at the same time as producing what was essentially a huge feature list in the background and then dropping it all at the same time.

5:53Joshua Mills: There's a ridiculous amount of technical risk doing something like that because you're going to go live. It can trip up stuff that is live because once you're live, that's when the truth starts coming out. And that kind of stand up was we were essentially building a game while still shipping the live game at the same time for a good while there. So there was a lot of fatigue that was building on the team. The goal was to kind of kick off for a big 10 year anniversary of Siege. I mean, it's a huge accomplishment. Like, I mean, we're in company with some of the greats out there and it's really awesome to be able to be here for 10 years.

6:23Joshua Mills: So we wanted to do something special. This meant some fundamental rebuilds of different modules within our engine, pushing our lighting system and our audio system further and stuff like this. It was a huge undertaking. And then when we came out there, really what it came down to was the idea that right as soon as we launched, we needed to rest. We had to give the team some time to kind of recover from this. And then that caused a bit of a content lull that happened in the seasonal cadence. And that really hurt where people are like super excited about the stuff coming, excited about the future of what Siege was going to be.

6:55Joshua Mills: and then we went a little bit quiet as we came out. And I think fundamentally, that was where we kind of misaligned with the expectations of our community. And we had some trust to rebuild after that. I guess it was a bit of a bad time to do that because it also happened to be a moment where I know there are different types of games, but suddenly Battlefield does its thing and Art Raiders does its thing and you've got these competitors. I understand that a lot of the time you're snatching players away from each other and then they come back and all that kind of stuff. But if you've slowed down your output at a time And when these sort of things happening, I guess that poses business challenges as well.

7:28Joshua Mills: That's definitely the thing. Like we're always like the ebb and flow of players, like moving between different games and different experiences. I think the one thing that we know, we know that DNA of Siege is super unique and super special. And we know there's nothing quite like it, which is why many of us work on it in the first place. So really what that meant was, okay, listen, like let's get our rest for a second, rally, and then start working towards it. And that's where we rebuilt our new content cadence, a bunch of different things like this. to kind of make those measurable steps moving forward.

7:57Joshua Mills: Have you had to make any changes to the team after all that? Oh, well, I mean, the reality is we did have, so when Alex stepped out and then I took the creative director role, the majority of the core team has actually been updated because a lot of them had been on the project for seven years or a long time. And a lot felt that CJAX was a good opportunity, like this is a big moment, we'll do this anniversary together and then we'll go on to our next chapter. And so there was a big shift of a lot of personnel going through. So we have a new game director, we have new folks in different positions and stuff like this.

8:31Joshua Mills: It's all adjusting. And obviously there's, I would say, growing pains that come with that, where everyone's kind of adjusting into their new roles. But all in all, this is that generational team I'm talking about where there's kind of a constant evolution that happens where people bring their best for a bunch of years and they'll put what they want and what they can into the game. and then they'll be like, all right, I think my chapter is done. I'm going to move on to something else. So I'm not caught up with the Rainbow Six Siege in a long time. I'm interested, is it all set up? Are you all in Montreal?

8:59Is that where most of this takes place?

9:01Joshua Mills: We're pretty global. So we do have a lot of codevs. So we have codevs in Barcelona. We have codevs in other parts of Quebec as well and over in Shanghai. So we do have people around the world. But the majority of the team or like your core kind of hive mind is in Montreal. Okay. Obviously, the big change from a corporate level, I don't know if it affects you, there's been Vantage Studios and Tencent sort of being more involved and at least co-owning it. Has that actually changed anything for you? Do you suddenly have access to Tencent's array of hit live service game makers you can tap into and get on the phone?

9:34Joshua Mills: So, I mean, things have definitely changed. I think one of the coolest things about it is we have like a much more direct line with HQ. I may be jumping on a topic that you might bring up later, but there was a hack that happened at Christmas a little while back. and when that occurred like I was in a chat like Charlie was in the chat with us and we were all sitting up like a couple days after Christmas in conversations for you know what was going on ramping the team back online and kind of calling people in to get things moving the point being like we were all in it together and it kind of felt like we were thick as thieves which was really really cool in that regard because there's a real rally point around the game to try to protect it and kind of get things moving so between that and the fact that we have open communication if there's conversations we need resources we need or anything like that we can just talk.

10:16Joshua Mills: And that's really great. So there's a lot less, I don't want to say, layers of stuff we have to go through in order to have a transparent conversation. We can have those relatively easily, which is, I think, a really, really good improvement. Outside of that, when we're talking about Tencent, we're definitely working with our partners there. We've announced Siege China is something that's happening, so we're working with them. And that's been a great collaboration because, yes, there's a lot of insight on the region that we just don't have. So being able to work with them has been incredible. China's tricky because there's an element of cultural changes and things you have to sort of make to adapt to that.

10:49But obviously it's tricky, but a huge opportunity if you can get it right. But this one company that can help you do that is Tencent, isn't it? It sounds to me like you've had quite a baptism, to be honest. You've come in off a really challenging and you said fatigue team with X. You've then seen a lot of people leave and you've had to rebuild that way. you've had this horrible hack happen in December and you've had to look at everything again. Are you okay?

11:19Joshua Mills: Let's just say I didn't have the hair before, so it's not like I lost it during this. No, honestly, like kind of the thing that I'll say is like the new core team, and I can say this very honestly, like I think we've all become very like good friends and we've kind of been, like you said, baptized in the fire of everything going on. But that's been awesome. And the reason I say it's awesome is because it really felt like uh like we can handle anything together and this team can handle anything together so as things are coming up we're less like all right this is like we take our hit and we find out what we do next and we kind of keep moving and that could be like maybe a new cheap provider comes out and now they're attacking our game it's like okay cool that's a new conversation we're going to have and we're going to get on that we're going to ramp up in different ways and then counter it but yeah it's been tough in a lot of different ways but I don't know.

12:06Joshua Mills: When you talk about this idea of like, oh, it's quite the way of jumping into it. I look at my career and most of my career was always that, where it was like, okay, here's the deep end, go. And then figure it out from there. So I think surrounding yourself with good people makes a huge difference on being able to weather the storm there. I wasn't asked too much about that hack, but I will ask, how has that impacted things? I think one of the big things is like, well, we did a rollback whenever it happened. And so basically we shut everything down, rolled back the data and did this. So we've just kind of updated a bunch of virtual processes and stuff like that to go faster, if something like this were to ever happen or occur again.

12:44Joshua Mills: So you have your best laid plan for the what if, then it happens, you're like, okay, well, we could be better. So ultimately it was that. Outside of this, we know we tend to get attacks launched at us right around Christmas because they know we're off. Now I'm gonna say. So like this is kind of the thing. So we've built up extra layers around that, too. Well, I mentioned earlier the shooter genre. It's always been I know I know your game is very different. It's very unique, and that's why it's managed to succeed over 11 years. But it's always still a very competitive scene. And last year we had obviously Battlefield and Ark Raiders suddenly enter the fight and track loads of numbers.

13:20I'm interested in this. When big launches like that happen or even when it's like a game that's been around for ages, does a big update like you did, I guess, with X and it disrupts things, even if it's a short term disruption. How do you have to react to that?

13:32Joshua Mills: Or do you just not? I think one thing is, I mean, from a business point of view, we prepare accordingly. Like we know something's coming along the lines. Like, I mean, we've got a big one coming this year with GTA. Obviously, it doesn't matter what genre you're in, you're going to get hit when that drops. So it's like you have to think ahead and be like, OK, bring your expectations in line of what's going to go on there. People are going to go play and they'll come back and stuff like this. And heck, all of us are going to play. Like, that's what happens. like even like battlefield play battlefield they're all through it yeah it comes out of course we're playing um so as far as that goes it's it's being smart about your expectations during that window uh so that you can keep all those expectations in and run with hq with the team as well because the the team is affected by the same thing so if they see that we don't like our players are going down or whatnot they can get uh almost like an anxiety about it as well but it's it's all temporary generally speaking because we know the core is there and the one rule we have is to act as if uh for those who are staying and connected the whole time serve them like kings and queens like make sure that they constantly have what it is that we offer and make sure we serve them to the best of our ability we don't go on vacation because there's a competitor that's kind of you know swelling the market for a second no we do our double down and serve as best as we can during that time and give even more during that time just to make sure that anyone who is spending that most valuable resource time is rewarded for spending it with us you're probably not doing a major update during those periods are you well we that's the funny thing because we will have our season four drop right around that time but that's okay because like uh this shifts up the game in a bunch of different ways we do have some surprises that we actually haven't talked about.

15:18Joshua Mills: So like we are we are holding a few things just to make a bit of a splash. Well, okay. Well, that's interesting. I like asking this question. If you've heard the Warframe, I might have asked it to them as well, because it's been 11 years since, you know, nearly 11 years since Siege launched. 18 year olds that bought that game in December 2015, they're now knocking on 30. And as you know, that becomes a tricky age. Folks have careers, maybe families, when they start the game to that point. Have you had to adapt much to an aging audience? Or do you find that new people come in? It's such a good question because like I can tell you this like our audience has definitely aged lower now with like just more players coming in who are younger than what we've seen in the past which is cool it's awesome to see people like looking for that challenge and jumping into the game but their expectations are different as well because you take that that's someone who played 10 years ago which is myself like and what I am now I am very much I'm not going to be the most mechanically driven player anymore I have to rely on all the strategy and all the gadgets and everything like this.

16:16Joshua Mills: Whereas like a lot of the younger players are, they'll click heads. Like they are absolutely insane with their sticks or the mouse and keyboard. So they'll run and gun it a little bit more. So they change the pace of the game, the meta of the game because of the way they like to play. One thing that we've talked about a lot and like you can see this, like even with that market shifting younger, you go, well, they want faster. They want this. It's like, yeah, but that's not what Siege is. Like Siege is a tactical, like methodical game. We need to be true to it. And anytime we've veered away from it or whatnot, you get that immediate lash back from the core because the core knows what the game is, which is it's a thinking man shooter.

16:53Joshua Mills: That's kind of the way it's chess when it comes down to it. And we've done different things. Like in the past, we've slowed down ADS times and different things like this, because again, they were so mechanically good that they were on the verge of just breaking the actual net code of what they could do because of how fast they were moving around the game and like tickle peeking and all these things. When you do that, you break the entire immersion of the game. You break this idea that you are this tactical elite unit and you just look like Rambo. So there was a real consensus to be like, we need to know who we are and we need to focus on that.

17:28Joshua Mills: I did a talk inside Ubisoft. This is the most ridiculous thing I'm probably going to say this entire conversation. We do this thing called UDC, which is like Ubisoft developer conference kind of thing. and the clip I used was a clip from Moana because you can tell I have kids. So, and it's the part where she's like, I am Moana, she's on the board at the end when all her ancestors come up. Yeah. Because the reality is Siege is a product of its past and the entire franchise that came before. So anytime we want to push the game or we are challenging what the game is meant to be or what that core identity is, we got to not necessarily look in everybody else's backyards but look back to where we came from and readjust to that point.

18:09So between that and then rallying the community around that concept

18:13Joshua Mills: and that idea has been our main focus. Just to let people know this is a methodical tactical shooter. If you want to run and do all that stuff, Siege isn't going to be the place for you. You mean the moment after Maui has left and ran away and she's alone on the boat, right? Yeah. My man. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yes. And the heart of Te Fiti went down to the ocean. Yes. That moment. Yeah. Yeah. I've also got kids. and the uh well before we deviate off clock and ask me for the film the new one um but you were right so i spoke to arrowhead around hell divers 2 launch and they got caught up in this because they launched hell divers 2 which they viewed as like an escape from tarkov sort of thing and then they had millions of call of duty players play like millions of call of duty players jumped in and they're like oh well what do we do for these players and then they sort of went away from what the game was supposed to be to try and satisfy those Call of Duty players.

19:07And they soon realized their mistake and they course corrected. But that's exactly what you're talking about, which is you might want to chase that lovely audience you suddenly managed to bring in. But long term, it's probably not the best.

19:18Joshua Mills: Oh, yeah. You lose your core. Exactly. Well, it's interesting because obviously you've done a bit of free to play and all this sort of stuff. Are you finding you're bringing in lots of new users there? I mean, based on what you just said, the answer is yes. What keeps Rainbow Six going, basically? Is it this engaged audience that you have, or is it these new players that come in and cycle in? Or is it a bit of both? It is a bit of both. I think ultimately, once Rainbow gets its hooks in you, you're done. There's literally nothing else that feels like it. And that's really what makes it stand out.

19:48Joshua Mills: So if you've crossed that echelon into getting to the point where something clicks, where you could be like, oh wait, I didn't just immediately get shot off the spawn, or whatever, then you're kind of starting to see the magic of it. and then you start doing the what if scenario game where it's like, well, what if I did this? Well, what if I did this? Well, what if I did this? And you can do that a billion times in the same map that's been out for 10 years. Sure, it's been remastered or updated and stuff like this, but essentially it's the same essence and that's where the magic goes and then every update we do, we shake the board a little bit and then you're like, okay, well now what if, what if, what if.

20:21Joshua Mills: We do see a lot more players checking out the game because we have free access so they can jump into the game and give it a go and then we see a lot of players bounce, which we knew was going to happen where they come in they're like okay whoa no these people are crazy and then they leave um which is why we we've put such a focus on our onboarding and this is one of the things that we're constantly working on to give full context it was year seven when we got a tutorial so like this is not something that we've been uh like stellar about doing to introduce people into the game something we're kind of building towards we have our new uh machine learned ai essentially like where we use player data to actually drive our ai because siege is so complicated just straight up programming and ai to do what an operator can do in all the scenarios it's not enough so we actually feed it player data to be able to figure out where it goes the best placement of the gadgets and everything like this the whole interactions so those sort of systems are helping a lot for players to get into the game and uh we're making it so that we're kind of building those that staircase on the side of the mountain which is the mastery of siege so So it's helping a lot and people are sticking.

21:26Joshua Mills: But again, the second the hook gets in you, you're like, okay, you're done. Like it is such a special thing. But yeah, it is definitely a different beast to say you're not going to be good for a while. And if you're willing to put in the time, you're going to find that special, I don't know, the magic that everybody else sees. My one suggestion I've had on the show that I quite liked around AI was the fact that because I'm an older player, sometimes I disappear from a game for a while. and I'll come back and I'll have to be reminded where it is. I'd love for some tool or whatever to be able to come in and just say, all right, okay, just remind you, this is where you're up to.

22:04This is the new stuff we've introduced. Just like it knows why I might be a bit lost. 100%. Yeah, I think that'd be useful. We've had like, isn't the number, 100 million players in the game over time?

22:17Joshua Mills: Oh, yeah, yeah. Like we're well past that now, but yeah. Do you spend much time, like obviously, you talk about people cycling out, But do you spend much time thinking about how to win them back, or is that not really part of it? I mean, that's definitely a part of it, because the reality is if we have players that are falling off the game for one reason or another, it could be just personal reasons, like you said, like that life happens and you've got more responsibilities. But at the end of the day, we want it to be a place that if this is the kind of game that you want to play, that this is the experience for you.

22:48Joshua Mills: And any of the rough edges that are in the game that are causing you to bounce off of it, we're investigating those to see what's the problem here. Is this necessary for the game to be the game itself? Some of those rough edges 100 % are, like one shot headshot and Siege is a very integral part to how the game feels. But other things that are in the game right now, for example, we are actually in this season, we're introducing the mini map into a quick match. So we didn't have a mini map up until this time, but map knowledge is fundamentally one of the hardest things for people to learn and new maps, our players stay away from them because they don't want to risk their ELO and everything like this.

23:23Joshua Mills: So we're trying to find new ways to get people more comfortable and get that level of competency quickly. And if you walked away from the game, let's say in year seven, we've released a ridiculous amount of operators since then and guns and everything else. That can be incredibly overwhelming. You're going to need an AI lecture thing like you were talking about in order to catch up. So we are looking at different ways to kind of reactivate players in that regard and serve them where they are because some folks have a very clear idea of what Rainbow Six is meant to be, and we're trying to drive towards that.

23:55That's got to be really. When you get to the age you are, you've got people wanting one thing. You've talked about young people coming in, expecting different stuff, and I often find that's where people fall down. One of my favorite games is Sea of Thieves, and there's players that just want to shoot. They want to shoot everything. And there's players that don't. Why do you have to have it where you shoot people and you can attack people? You've got completely different audiences. I have to imagine as a developer, you're sort of looking at the two groups of people wanting the opposite thing. it's really hard and it's not a question i just i sort of sympathize it is it is really tough

24:24Joshua Mills: because like if we look at the siege you're actually just the market in general the way people kind of uh engage with like free access games and stuff like this whether it be through cosmetics some people like really over the top stuff siege is a tactical shooter based on military operations where some some folks just want like the most tactical thing and that's it like they don't want anything they don't want to see any of the collabs and stuff like this and that's a real clash between the player engagement and how people engage with their games, because that's a totally different way of looking at it and how you play.

24:52Joshua Mills: What we try to do is make clear lines where it's like, this is what siege is, and if we do an event like Assault on Hereford, this is canon. So there will be nothing like this is true to what actual Rainbow Six franchise is. If you're in a PvP match, player expression is king at that point. They can do whatever they want and stuff like that, but if we're driving the narrative or we're showing an asset, it's going to be canon. I'll change the subject a little bit. How does the eSports side of things influence you? Does it have much impact on what you're doing? It's pretty big actually because like everything we do like a new operator or whatnot we do all the testing with our pros first because they're going to be the ones who are going to break it like 100 % and they're going to break it very fast if we get it to them and they're like oh well if you do this and this then the game is unplayable for these reasons because nobody can open a wall or nobody can do this so we work really closely with our bro teams to have really early testing.

25:42Joshua Mills: At this point, I think they're usually, I don't know, two, three ops ahead of where we actually are in the release cadence of the calendar. This includes balancing changes and different conversations like that. We'll go to a major, which is one of our esports events throughout the year. And what we've started to do is we'll actually do a meeting with the pros early when the competitions first starting, and then just sit down and show them everything for the reveal coming up and then things coming down the line to get their feedback on where things are going and if it aligns to what they expect at their level now not every change is for esports in fact the majority of the stuff we do we focus on our core community but if something happens on one of our stages like say the si stage somebody pulls off a crazy player crazy interaction six months later that's in everybody's rent game so like it's it's kind of a signal for us i see i see you've got so many different areas to this and so many different challenges well opportunities as well and i'm not always mean that in a negative sense.

26:39How big is your team, is the Rainbow Six team?

26:41Joshua Mills: Can you say? I think worldwide now we're over 600. Oh, wow. So like, because we have co-devs around the world and stuff like this. So yeah, we're a pretty big team. We were bigger during X for the natural thing that we were building a game at the same time as producing the live content. So you kind of ramp up like a normal production would do. Yeah. But yeah, we're still pretty big, but there's a lot going on because there's the entire esports side of things. Obviously, there's the store stuff. there's the gameplay and all the different uh playlists that we run because we have a lot of content that's dropping throughout the season as well so how's the free to play stuff i know it's not all free to play but the ability to come in for free has that had much of an impact it sounds like it might have done in terms of types of players you had coming in uh 100 as far as types of players you get a lot of uh like uh well i don't like the term but it's like it's i've heard it called tourists someone who's just checking it out because they're like oh it's free i can just download it and i'll take a look at it so folks will come in and see the game there are a decent amount of people who will just stay in the free access ecosystem because basically for us paid access unlocks ranked we did it for security concerns as well just to keep it that one layer away from just easy testing against like what cheats and stuff like this but generally speaking you do see people come in check out stuff see if they like it and then bounce back out engagement is there actually it's raised over time like the amount of people that are coming in and kind of finding the spark, they're sticking around longer.

28:02Joshua Mills: So that's really cool. But there's a large amount of traffic, I'll say that, of people coming in and checking out the game now, compared to when you had to put down your$5 originally. It's a fascinating world. And it seems to be one that's constantly changing. And I know a lot from this, but what's your goal? I guess when you took charge, and I know that you've been working on the game for a while, but when you took charge, I guess you might have had a vision of where you'd like to take the game. I know the players end up leading that in a lot of the ways, but Where would you like to see Siege in, I don't know, five years?

28:32Joshua Mills: Well, I mean, like you said, the players do lead a lot of it because that's the one key thing is we listen really closely to what the players are experiencing and living in the moment-to-moment matches because that's what really matters. But I think when we talk about where we want to take Siege and, like, we're driving towards, I look back to a few years ago, we had a real tone shift in the game. So it was the last SI we did in Montreal where essentially Harry, which was the six at the time uh he was killed by deimos like this is all lore stuff in a pvp game i know that doesn't necessarily uh shake everyone but the reality was when it happened it was a real signal to everyone that the stakes are back and rainbow was back in a very big way is in the sense that we're gonna be that counter-terrorist unit we're gonna be uh this uh much more gritty and grounded kind of approach to the game uh because it was a little bit combat sports-esque before that it was kind of a turn that it went to.

29:25Joshua Mills: We're kind of doubling down on this and kind of focusing on that back to Roots. This is why many of the different things that we've introduced into the game have been callbacks from the original franchise. So Deimos is Gerald Morris coming back from the game. Scopos is Carys. There's a bunch of different references coming out of the original franchise. We even released Casino, which was from Vegas 2, like the the vegas games all of for the idea of just again reminding where we're from so that we stay the course and we focus on our core identity and solidify it and then armor it and what i mean by armor it is because all the mechanics and siege are very unique and they're they add to this ridiculously cool system of interactions and creativity and we want to reinforce that we want to show that if i'm being as competitive as most siege players are i want us to be the best at it where it's like this is impenetrable you can't even come close to what siege can pull off as far as the level of 10 years of investment into these interactions and into this kind of chess like fps um continuing to go that way bring really exciting technological technological advancements as we're going forward as well uh because as of right now like we are still we run on ps4 all the way up so that's a pretty wide spread of like tech to be working on right now um but there's a lot of opportunity on the horizon and uh i'm trying to be as cryptic as possible because i don't want to leak anything but uh the reality is when we look at siege and people ask like oh like is it hard to come up with operators and stuff like that and it's like no because it's always a question of what if so what if this happened and i'll give you the example of we added these things called destructible ingredients it's a simple thing of a gas pipe You shoot it and it does this.

31:14Joshua Mills: So we have Team A, Team B, and Team C being the map now. And I think that's where things get really exciting is when we add these extra levels of interaction and extra levels of what if into the game. This might sound like a stupid question, but do you ever need to do a Siege 2? Is that something that... Yeah. It's a funny one because it's come up a lot and it came up a lot during X. Oh, really? Yeah, because the question was like, why do Siege X and not do just Siege 2? one of the big things is the fundamentally rebuilding our entire system it's a mountain of work to do and to nail it and to get it right and to be able to scale in the way we're doing if we were to want to do something like this siege would have to essentially go on ice in order to do because i don't think we could ever do something of that scale like we did with c like siege x is not even close to the level of scale we're talking about if we were to go and rebuild the entire game and kind of make a siege too i think uh end of the day the way we've architectured our technology where it's very modular so when we did x we rebuilt the audio and the lighting system and both of those are maturing right now so the foundations were rebuilt and now we're actually taking the new levels as we push forward this is all kind of behind the scene stuff but we can do that with all the different parts of our game and we've been doing it with different parts of our game for the last 10 years so the need for doing it is not necessarily completely there with the cost of what would happen when you have to shut the lights off and then do that.

32:39Joshua Mills: Because you can't possibly run both at the same time with the fact that you would need the expertise of the team that's running the game to rebuild the game. That kind of thing. So it'd be really, really difficult to do. And again, our tech teams are able to run ahead and rebuild the modules anyways. So it makes it pretty easy for us to take those steps incrementally. I think I'm also not entirely convinced based on these other games, I don't know about your audience, but certainly the other games, people really want. Oh, it needs to look flashy. It looks fancy. You know, I find it hilarious. I mean, I know it's completely different, but I find it hilarious.

33:08The old school RuneScape is bigger than RuneScape. I don't think some of the stuff, some of that stuff necessarily matters as much as we did once upon a time.

33:16Joshua Mills: Yeah, for our core, it really doesn't. I mean, I was at the EWC just the other day, like in Paris, and we had the demo booth set up with the new season. And every time I walked by, all the screens were set by four by three and stretch resolution, everything on low, looking like completely like flat lighting and stuff like this because everyone's going for all those FPSs and then they're running, they just run at the lowest settings anyway because it's what we're used to. And that is very much the core audience of Siege runs like this. So we have a lot of conversations internally. When we were rebuilding the lighting system and modernizing the maps, the question was, should we really do this?

33:53Joshua Mills: Does anybody care? And the reality on that is it's more about this idea where people talk about, especially Siege prior to the modernization of the maps. Folks were saying that the maps were a bit more flat and the lighting and stuff like this because they were hyper competitive and that's what we went for and it made total sense. But the richness is what everybody has in their head as to what Siege is and what Rainbow Six is. So they think of the original E3 trailer, they think of Vegas and all these moments where it's flashlights and gritty and dark and like, you know, it's people rappelling down the building and then breaking in and everything busting up and stuff like this.

34:32Joshua Mills: Whereas in the game, because we were so focused on competitive, we had cleaned all that out and made everything super, super easy and readable. So we had new outline systems and stuff like that to allow us to get a little bit more to the rich lighting. But it is funny. We get this feedback that it doesn't matter, like all the lighting and all these things. But then we'll get the exact same feedback from pros. And this was the funniest thing I had heard during all this was we had the gas pipes. we showed them for the first time and one of the pro teams said we can't put those on bank bank is one of our maps and we're like uh why they're like well gas pipes wouldn't be in a bank like that doesn't make it oh they're like well maybe in the basement so they cared more about the realization of it being in the basement and i'm like but you're the same players who will turn off everything and stretch a resolution but they cared that the gas pipe made sense in the world so it's not how it looks it's what it does yeah i get it i think it makes sense i think it's fascinating um josh it's Lovely chatting to you.

35:26I love the fact the game's still going. I remember its launch and to see it go from strength to strength and be one of the key tactical shooters in the world and doing this well is phenomenal. It's great to see it going and good luck with all the challenges and opportunities you've got ahead.

35:39Joshua Mills: I appreciate it. I mean, I stand on the shoulder of giants that came before. Like Honest's team, we just carry forward the legacy of the game and it's an honor to be able to do it. Going to watch more now, right? I'll see you then. There you go. Take care. Bye-bye. so that's it for today's episode of the game business show and join us for more news analysis insight and interviews in the days and weeks ahead to make sure you don't miss an episode you need to go to thegamebusiness.com pop in your email and you'll get an email every time we put out a new edition but that's it from us today until next time thank you for tuning in