December 2025 marks Rainbow Six Siege’s 10-year anniversary, and the game is still standing tall within the live-service first-person shooter space. However, it wasn’t always that way. The title had its fair share of ups and downs, especially as it struggled to find its footing in its first year, but the developers stuck it out, applying themselves to their craft and wielding the full extent of their passion to build up a game that has now made it past its first decade.
Game Rant was recently invited to Ubisoft Montreal’s Rainbow Six Siege 10th Anniversary Event where we got to sit down with the game’s creative director, Alexander Karpazis, as well as game director Joshua Mills in order to discuss the past and the future of this storied FPS franchise.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
GR: Rainbow Six Siege just turned 10 years old, which is a huge achievement for a live service game. In a landscape where other titles within that live service space have failed, what’s been Siege’s secret sauce for this kind of longevity?
AK: I think part of it is timing and dedication. If we think about the launch of the game in 2015, it really was the inception of games as a service. The game was kind of lucky in that it didn’t have as much competition as you maybe have today in establishing yourself. But the other thing was dedication. And when we talk about the story of Siege, when it first came out, it wasn’t the huge smashing success that it is now. It needed some work and the team doubled down on it, and that kind of dedication, I think, is ultimately the thing that shone through and really put us where we are today.
JM: I think it’s the team trying to be closer and closer aligned with our community as well. A lot of the members on the team are active players at all sorts of different ranks, which is invaluable to us when we’re building anything, because we can test that against all the different demographics that exist in the game. But on top of that, we have the voice of the community on the team. So, we’re able to actually use that and leverage that as we move forward. But building those connections and working with our pros helps with integrating as much as possible, so we are as close as possible to what the end result is, and we are as close as possible to what the need is from the community. In large part, I think that’s where our success comes from. And then, when we think about the nature of the game, it’s an incredibly deep game with an immense amount of creativity available to the player. And, man, the players are creative. They’ll come up with all sorts of stuff and bring themselves to the match every time. And I think that’s what really shines through for a lot of folks.
GR: I know in an interview you did recently, Alex, you talked about how you and the team were setting the table for the next 10 years of Siege. What does planning a second decade for a game like this look like? And how do you navigate an industry that’s ever-changing? An industry that, for example, might have a new console generation in two years?
AK: You already started answering part of it: it’s anticipating. That’s the beauty of the medium. We are tied so closely to technology, and that technology actually unlocks new opportunities for the team and the game to explore. Anticipating something like a new generation of consoles or improvement in specs is something that you have to anticipate. And while one part of it is technology, the other part is creativity. This is a game that I don’t think anyone is at a loss for creating new ideas, so how do we exploit this amazing tactical sandbox that we have today? Those are the two ingredients that actually make it really easy to start saying: “Well, okay, this is where we need to go in the short term and, in the long term, from one year to two years to 10 years.”
JM: What does it look like? It’s a very, very long spreadsheet, but the reality is it’s putting markers down as to what we can project ahead by looking at trends in the industry. But more importantly, it’s where we want to drive to on that anticipation of technology, on that anticipation of core features that are maybe in development that aren’t player-facing right now. Once all these different systems and things line up, we start opening up all the potential. With Siege, because it’s been around for 10 years, the development mindset is adjusted a little bit from not just about what’s coming next week, but to how we set seeds down now that are going to be ready for us next year. It’s having people doing that R&D work ahead of us so that when we get to that point, we can harvest it and build on that, flip it to player-facing, and then continuously do it again.
GR: I’d actually like to expand on that a bit, Joshua. I’d seen in an interview that you were talking about how the team always has a pool of ideas: be it for back-end development or just operator ideas. I think you referred to it as the fridge. First off, where does that name come from? And secondly, what sort of factors are you considering when you’re looking ahead short-term for the next seasons?
JM: So the whole fridge thing: it kind of flip-flops between fridge and freezer, but it is the idea that maybe we’re working on something that we can’t technically pull off right now. We’ll put it on ice, and then pull it back out. A very, very good example of this was Skopós. That operator took us over two years to actually build properly, I believe, because the concept was so freaking cool. It’s realized teleportation in Siege. How could we pull that off? The tech constraints on that are essentially having an extra operator on the field. It’s memory budgets, and a whole bunch more. It took us a while to actually be able to figure it out and then redeploy it. But when it came out of the freezer, it defrosted and then was ready to go.
Now, to the second part of your question about the complexity of the game and introducing new ideas. One of the things we try to do is be as systemic as possible, because that allows us to break down the problems into much easier bite sizes. If you just throw something new in there, it’s going to mess up everything. So it’s easier to break that down into buckets. Again, we’re talking about large spreadsheets, and for a new operator going in, there is an in-depth interaction chart that we go through to line up exactly how they’re going to interact with every single system in the game. Then, what happens on occasion is we’ll introduce someone like Brava, who is now flipping every gadget to the opposite team, which was never done before. We also have alliances that have to be built and developed. So it all challenges the systems and allows us to say: “There’s a core problem there. We need to rebuild that whole thing.” Again, this isn’t necessarily player-facing, but once it’s established development-wise, it becomes a lot easier for us to conceptualize and introduce new things.
GR: Let’s talk a bit about both of your journeys within the industry. Alex, you have been with the Rainbow Six Siege team since 2017 in different roles: presentation art director, art director, and now creative director. During this time, have you ever reflected on your time working on the game? Are there any sort of parallels that you’ve seen between how the game has evolved over 10 years as well as your own professional career?
AK: There is a level of maturity in both paths that I’ve seen and not only just for myself. For example, nobody knows what presentation direction is, but it is a much smaller subset of the game. As such, that was something that was easier to focus on. Then, once you move more towards art direction and creative direction, you have to take a lot more things into account. You have to communicate a lot more, and you have to make sure everything’s moving in the right direction. I think we’ve seen over time that Siege has matured itself. We’re making sure that we’re always communicating, not just between ourselves, but with the community. I think we’re getting better and better at that every single year. And that’s not necessarily just because of me. It’s definitely not just because of me. It’s because the entire team is growing, learning, becoming more mature and developing these kinds of instincts that only 10 years of existence can give a live production game.
