How to download match replays from the Six Invitational

Replays of professional Rainbow Six Siege matches have been one of the most requested features from the R6 competitive community for years.

Without them, creating content about how the game works at its highest level is difficult. There’s no way to tell definitively whether effective teamwork and droning led to a kill or whether a play was due to individual effort. There’s also no real way to gauge setups, other than VOD review, which can be incomplete due to the perspective of the observer not capturing all the elements of the play.

But now, match replays will be publicly available to all those who follow a couple of steps. Content around the competitive aspects of the game is about to become excellent and there will be proper teaching of what to do and what not to do using real in-game examples as opposed to hypotheticals.

Here’s how to download these match replays for yourself so you can get in on the action or watch your favorite player’s perspective throughout a game.

First, navigate to the announcement page on the official Ubisoft website. From there, you’re going to want to download the zipped files linked a little bit down the page.

Once you’ve downloaded the folder, unzip it, then copy it into the “MatchReplay” folder in Windows. Don’t edit the name of the folder or the files. They should look something like this: “Match-2021-05-11_17-30-30-10” for the folder and the name of the individual files should look like: “Match-2021-05-11_17-30-30-10-R01.rec.”

As a reminder, you can only save 12 replays at a time to your watch tab. That’s not 12 replays of 12 matches, that’s 12 replays of 12 individual maps that may or may not be part of a best-of-three. Your R6 client will only be able to read replays from less than three months ago, as patch-specific constraints apply.

The match replay system is extremely healthy for the game long term and should make the more arcane or not publicly available strategies more accessible for the layman—not to mention all the content around the competitive parts of the scene that can now be created. It’s a win all around for Ubisoft and R6 fans.