R6 sees record viewership for all regional leagues following addition of cosmetic drops

If there’s one thing we can learn from the wild success of the beginning of the 2021 season for Rainbow Six Siege’s regional leagues in terms of viewership, it’s that pack drops work.

It’s simple: If you watch four hours of a Ubisoft-affiliated broadcast of an R6 regional league, you can manually claim an “esports pack” that contains cosmetic items. Viewers can claim up to three packs per week. And the addition of these packs has led to the exponential growth that R6 broadcasts have experienced recently.

The EUL reached a peak of 110,000 concurrent viewers across all Twitch and YouTube platforms during the Rogue vs. Team Vitality match on March 23 and the NAL reached a peak of 115,000 concurrent viewers, according to Ubisoft. BR6 broke records as well and APAC South and North continued their strong upward trends.

The drops, improved efforts to create engaging content around the leagues, and several other factors have all coincided in a blockbuster opening to the R6 esports season.

The hype the game is generating will be excellent for its biggest event, the Six Invitational, which has been postponed to May instead of its normal February start point due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Twenty teams originally qualified for the event, but further format changes could be in the cards due to understandable pandemic-related circumstances.