Ubisoft has announced that some older Rainbow Six titles are being taken offline later this year. That means that any fans of the older Rainbow Six titles should make sure to get a few multiplayer matches or terrorist hunts in while they still can.
Taking down the multiplayer servers for older games is not uncommon, especially for series where disabling the multiplayer capability for older titles allows more resources to be dedicated to newer, more popular titles such as Rainbow Six Siege. The news is unfortunate for older fans, but all of the games being affected are at least a decade old, meaning the servers were available considerably longer than some other titles.
The news comes from a post to Ubisoft's forums by a support staff member. It details that servers going offline will remove any multiplayer content from Rainbow Six Lockdown, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Rainbow Six Vegas 2, as well as any usability they have connected to Ubisoft Connect, the company's integrated reward service that gives Rainbow Six players points that can be used to unlock new content like cosmetics. For consoles, the service will be entirely removed from the games.
Notably, the forum post doesn't include what dates the online services will be taken down for the games, but does confirm shutdown will occur sometime this year. Fans will still be able to play through various Rainbow Six campaigns as well as run local terrorist hunt missions in single-player or split-screen, but now Rainbow Six Siege will be the only game in the series with multiplayer until Rainbow Six: Parasite launches. The shutdown will also bring down the in-game news and player stats feature, meaning players will no longer be able to look back on their multiplayer history.
The announcement follows Sony closing some of its older PlayStation stores, and while it is unfortunate for fans of the games, the closing of servers is going to be a more frequent occurrence as the industry continues to move toward more online experiences. Other games mentioned in the post that are having their online features removed, such as Assassin's Creed 2 and Splinter Cell Conviction, have a listed date for the removal of June 1, 2021, so it is reasonable to expect it to happen sometime around then. Hopefully, Ubisoft will give fans a proper window of time to be able to play some more of the games before they are taken offline.
Rainbow Six Siege is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Ubisoft