Forget small teams, quick prototyping and failing fast – Ubisoft is throwing everything it can at Rainbow Six Mobile.
Announced earlier this month, Rainbow Six Mobile is heading into alpha testing soon, with soft launch to come. Ubisoft has confirmed to us that Tencent is among the many studios collaborating on the game, in addition to 11 of its own teams.
“Rainbow Six Mobile is being developed by Ubisoft Montreal in collaboration with several Ubisoft studios including Winnipeg, Quebec, Halifax, Paris, Bucharest, Kyiv, Redlynx, Pune, Chengdu and Shanghai,” Rainbow Six Mobile programmer Casey Hildebrand told us. “Over the course of the development process, Tencent has also been providing its expertise and counsel to our teams as part of our partnership to extend our brand’s reach to the significantly wider mobile audience.”
Hildebrand also confirmed that Rainbow Six Mobile has been in development for three years, and that it will have its own content release schedule, separate from PC and console title Rainbow Six Siege. As part of the game’s announcement, Ubisoft said the Montreal team leading the project was built from scratch to work on Rainbow Six Mobile, and is composed of both AAA console and mobile developers.
The studio leads meet regularly and use the same development processes, with tweaks for their own workflows, says Hildebrand. The intention is that all studios working on the project speak the same “production language”, as Hildebrand put it.
“The team working on Rainbow Six Mobile contains some of the most passionate and skilled people I’ve ever worked with,” he continued. “Our experience is varied across numerous important aspects of the production, both in terms of technical skill and design.”
When asked about how the game could stand out among big-name contenders like Call of Duty and Apex Legends, Hildebrand cited Rainbow Six Mobile’s “highly detailed destruction mechanics, tactical close quarters combat and fast-paced competitive aspect” as reasons it’ll cut through.
“Fans have been asking for a Rainbow Six mobile game for a long time,” added Hildebrand. “By bringing Rainbow Six Siege to mobile free-to-play, we’re opening the doors for a lot of new players to discover Siege’s unique style of fast-paced tactical gameplay, and for Siege fans to experience the game in a brand new way.”
Ubisoft has had a mixed record bringing its big-name franchises to mobile. Most recently, Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad, a battler which threw together characters from across the various Tom Clancy games, was launched and then sunset within a year. It also managed to cause controversy along the way, due to some sensitive imagery in the game that was quickly removed.
In 2016, Ubisoft launched Assassin’s Creed Identity, a console-style 3D action-adventure game, which was later closed and removed from app stores. Assassin’s Creed Rebellion, its collectible hero action-RPG, continues to be updated, however, and rumours persist that Ubisoft and Tencent are busy at work on another Assassin’s Creed mobile game.
