Rainbow Six Siege will be getting even fewer operators in Year 6
The content map reveal for Rainbow Six Siege's Year 5 came with a big update about Year 6.
At the Six Invitational over the weekend, Rainbow Six Siege developer Ubisoft talked a great deal about its plans for the game's current year - Year 5 - and a little bit about Year 6.
Year 5, as previously revealed, will bring six new operators to the game, down from eight as in previous years. The first two, coming in Season 1, were revealed on the same stream.
Ubisoft justified this by saying that having fewer operators allows the development team to focus on gameplay improvements, such as reworking existing operators.
The publisher has yet to reveal the price of the Year 5 Pass, so this cut could be reflected there. It's next year, however, that Siege will be getting even less content.
In Year 6, the number of operators drops to just four for the entire year, arriving at a rate of one per season. The Year 6 roadmap isn't clear on this, but it doesn't look like Siege players will be getting new maps; reworks are the more likely outcome.
Ubisoft will also continue to push the Battle Pass model next year, with four confirmed Battle Passes in Year 6, just like in the current year. Similarly, the price of the Year 6 Pass has yet to be confirmed - though we don't expect news on that to drop until early 2021.
The news is particularly interesting given that Ubisoft already confirmed Siege will be on PS5 and Xbox Series X at launch. It's possible the game is simply approaching the end of its life.
The more likely scenario, however, is that the developer is working on an upgraded, re-branded version of Siege behind the scenes. Usually, when this happens you can expect content from the current version to slowly make its way into the new one, which would explain the slower pace of new content in 2020 and 2021.