the new Rainbow Six boss on losing staff, Tencent, GTA and… Moana

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In This Edition,
Ubisoft’s Josh Mills on…

• The trials of Siege X

• Life under Tencent

• Younger vs older players

• Siege 2

You would imagine there is little to connect gritty tactical shooter Rainbow Six: Siege with animated Disney movie Moana. But you’d be surprised.

During a talk at one of Ubisoft’s developer conferences, Siege creative director Joshua Mills showed a clip from the movie where the lead character triumphantly sings: “I am Moana.”

The moment happens after Moana’s failed attempt to return a magical gem. She’s left adrift in the ocean feeling defeated, abandoned and lost. Until a ghost from her past appears, reminds her of who she is, and gives her the strength to fight again.

It’s that energy Mills is trying to bring to his tenure as the head of Siege.

Last year, the development team delivered the X update to mark ten years of the shooter. It introduced a free tier, a new mode, countless quality of life features, modernized visuals, destructible items and more. It was a hugely ambitious undertaking that didn’t go entirely to plan.

“There’s a ridiculous amount of technical risk in doing something like that,” says Mills in today’s The Game Business Show.

“We were essentially building a game while still shipping the live game at the same time for a good while. You’re ripping parts of the engine out and putting new parts in. It was a huge undertaking. A lot of fatigue was building on the team.

“As soon as we launched, we needed to rest. We had to give the team time to recover, and that caused a content lull in the seasonal cadence. That really hurt because people were super excited about all the changes and the future of Siege, and then we went a little quiet. We misaligned with the expectations of our community, and we had some trust to rebuild after that.”

That exhaustion brought about change in the team, too. And not just for Mills, who took over from Alexander Karpazis earlier this year.

“A lot of them had been on the project for seven years or longer,” Mills explains. “Many felt that Siege X was a big moment to finish that chapter before moving on.

“There was a big shift in personnel. Obviously, there are growing pains that come with everyone adjusting into new roles. But there’s this constant evolution where people bring their best for a bunch of years, put what they can into the game, and then move on.”

Mills was faced with a tired team that needed rebuilding, but the pain didn’t stop there. In December 2025, Rainbow Six: Siege was targeted by a hacker group that forced Ubisoft to take the game offline. The security breach saw thousands of accounts banned and unbanned and gave players large sums of in-game currency.

“Let’s just say I didn’t have hair before this, so it’s not like I lost it during the process,” he jokes.

“Honestly, the new core team has become very good friends. We’ve been baptized in the fire of everything going on, and it feels like we can handle anything together. As things come up, we take our hits, figure out what to do, and keep moving. Whether a new cheat provider comes out and attacks the game, we get on it.”

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Much like Moana, the new Rainbow Six team is looking to its past as it moves forward.

“A few years ago, we had a real tone shift in the game,” Mills tells us.

‘The last Six Invitational [esports event] we did in Montreal where [in-game character] Harry was killed by Deimos - this is all lore stuff in a PVP game and I know that doesn’t necessarily shake everyone - but when it happened, it was a real signal that the stakes are back and Rainbow Six is back. We’re going to be that counter-terrorist unit. We’re going to have this gritty and grounded approach, because it was a little combat sports-esque before that.

“We’re doubling down on this and focusing on that back-to-roots.”

You can check out the full chat with Mills above. Or, alternatively, read on for some other key stories.

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New Ubisoft structure is ‘a really good improvement’

Last year, Rainbow Six Siege was moved under a new division within Ubisoft called Vantage Studios. Led by Charlie Guillemot and Christophe Derennes, Vantage Studios is 26% owned by Tencent, which invested €1.16 billion in the division.

And according to Mills, it has had an immediate impact.

“Things have definitely changed. One of the coolest things is that we have a more direct line with HQ. When the hack happened at Christmas, Charlie and I were figuring out what was going on and calling people in. We were all in it together, thick as thieves. There was a real rally point around the game to protect it.

“If there are conversations or resources we need, we can just talk. There are fewer layers to go through to have a transparent conversation, which is a really good improvement.

“Outside of that, regarding Tencent, we’re definitely working with [them]. We’ve announced Siege China, and that’s been a great collaboration. There’s a lot of insight on that region that we don’t have.”

Rainbow Six: Siege has some surprises planned for GTA 6 launch

If you, like me, spend time poring over player numbers, you’ll know that whenever a big title comes out, it often has a negative effect on the games around it.

According to Ampere, across October and November, Rainbow Six Siege lost millions of players to titles like Battlefield 6, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Arc Raiders.

Mills says the key is to look after the players who stick around.

“We’ve got a massive launch coming with GTA,” Mills observes. “It doesn’t matter what genre you’re in; you’re going to take a hit when that drops. People are going to play it, and then they’ll come back. Heck, all of us are going to play it.

“It’s about being smart with your expectations so you can keep the team and HQ aligned. If the team sees player numbers dip, they can get anxious, but it’s generally temporary.

“Our golden rule is to serve the players who stay like kings and queens. We don’t go on vacation just because a competitor is swelling the market. We double down and reward those spending their valuable time with us.”

But surely they don’t plan to do any major updates when GTA 6 drops?

“Funnily enough, Season Four will drop right around that time,” Mills says. “That shifts up the game in different ways. We actually have some unannounced surprises held back to make a splash.”

Siege’s audience has shifted younger

It may be 11 years-old, but Rainbow Six: Siege has seen its audience skew younger. And that has created a challenge.

“Their expectations are different,” says Mills.

“Someone who played 10 years ago, like myself, isn’t going to be the most mechanically driven player anymore. I have to rely on strategy and gadgets. A lot of younger players are insane with their sticks or keyboard and mouse, so they run and gun a bit more, which changes the pace and meta of the game.

“Even with the market shifting younger, we remind ourselves that Siege is a tactical, methodical game. We need to stay true to that. Anytime we’ve veered away, we get immediate backlash from the core. This is a thinking man’s shooter. It’s chess at its core.

“In the past, we’ve slowed down aim-down-sights times, because players were so mechanically good they were breaking the netcode with how fast they moved and jiggle-peeked [a tactical strafing technique used in shooters]. When that happens, it breaks the immersion of being an elite tactical unit and makes you look like Rambo. If you want to wall-run and swan dive, Siege isn’t the place for you.”

Ubisoft recruits pro players to test Siege

Ubisoft tests all Rainbow Six: Siege updates with professional esports players.

“They’re going to be the ones who will break it very fast,” Mills says. “They’re like, ‘If you do this, then the game is unplayable for these reasons.’ So, we work closely with our pro teams to have really early testing. At this point, they’re usually two or three operators [playable characters] ahead of where we actually are in the release calendar.

“We’ll go to a major, which is one of our esports events, and we’ll show the pros everything for the reveal coming up, and things coming down the line, to get their feedback on whether it aligns to what they expect at their level.”

There’s no need for a Siege 2

As the game approaches its eleventh year, questions are being asked as to whether it’s time for a whole new Siege game. Mills isn’t convinced.

“It came up a lot during the X update,” he says. “The question was, ‘Why do Siege X and not just do Siege 2?’ Fundamentally rebuilding our entire system is a mountain of work. Siege X is not even close to the level of scale we’re talking about if we were to go and rebuild the entire game.

“End of the day, the way we’ve architectured our technology is very modular. So, when we did X, we rebuilt the audio and the lighting system, and both of those are maturing right now. The foundations were rebuilt. So, the need for doing it is not necessarily there with the cost of shutting the lights off. Because you can’t possibly run both at the same time. You would need the expertise of the team that’s running the game to rebuild it. It’d be really difficult to do.”

What’s more, for a lot of modern games, players don’t seem too concerned with visual fidelity.

“I was at the Esports World Cup in Paris, and we had the demo booth set up with the new season. Every time I walked by, all the screens were set by four-by-three and stretched resolution. Everything was on low, because everyone’s going for all those [frames per second]. The core audience of Siege runs like this. When we were rebuilding the lighting and modernizing the maps, it was: Should we really do this? Does anybody care?”

“The richness is what everybody has in their head with Rainbow Six. They think of the original E3 trailer. They think of flashlights and gritty and people rappelling down the building and breaking in. Whereas in the game, because we were so focused on competitive, we had cleaned all that out and made everything super readable.”

However, realism is important to players, Mills concludes. Just not necessarily in the visual sense.

“We had these gas pipes. We showed them for the first time. And one of the pro teams said, ‘you can’t put those on the Bank map.’ We’re like, ‘why?’ ‘Well, gas pipes wouldn’t be in a bank… maybe in the basement.’ They cared more about the realization of it being in the basement. And I’m like, ‘You’re the same players who will turn off everything and stretch the resolution’. But they care that the gas pipes make sense.”

Check out the full interview with Mills above.