There’s talk of Xbox being dropped and PC being the focus for next year. Can you tell us a bit more about that and the decision process behind it? AM: What we are deciding for year two when it comes to the overall eSports pro scene is two main big decisions. One of the decisions is to put a high focus on one of the platforms, and the decision has been made to put PC as the lead platform. That being said, the other good news or the other news or the key point for next year is the introduction of major league for both PlayStation and Xbox. So we are keeping an entry point to the competition for every format and every platform. Year two, by putting the lead on one platform, it’s going to create stability, and because we’re giving away one full year of visibility, one high focus on one platform, so there are more teams that we can enter with our investment and efforts that those guys have a sustainable year of competition ahead.

Is that also based on viewing patterns of what people tend to watch more, Xbox versus PC? It’s part of the… as you can imagine, it’s almost a two-step decision that happened. The first step was, we are going to be concentrating on one platform. And I think everyone around the table that was involved in the discussion and decision was, like, “This is almost a no-brainer. Yeah, focusing on one platform is what we should be doing, no doubt.” Then, obviously, the most difficult in the decision-making was, “Okay, which platform shall we focus on?” and we re-evaluated everything, I mean, “Why not even PlayStation [4]?” after all. So we looked at it, and some of the factors, including what you’re mentioning, the viewership. It doesn’t mean that Xbox viewers are not important at all, but I think there’s a little or even a big majority of watchers who are more of a PC background at least on Rainbow Six. And the last aspect of that viewership that’s more qualitative and it’s super interesting, and we sort of had to make the decision as well is while Xbox players and watchers do watch Xbox streams and PC streams, the opposite is not true. So, alright, we do have a larger PC viewership audience that is sticking to one sort of format or one scene and not watching the other. It’s showing a sustainable and potential… like, the growth was interesting for us, developers, PC is the lead platform for development, and so this is what we’ve been doing for the first year is the whole game is first and foremost developed and balanced on PC, and, obviously, we’re deploying everywhere at the parity level. But we’ve had the pro teams, Continuum for instance, come in the studio two, three times every season to try the content, give feedback, help us balance overall, so we do have constant workshops and discussions, and we can do this on PC, but not at all on console. We can’t have them test easily online or somewhere else the build on any of the consoles. So PC for us on the development side of things is easier.

The community is separated into the casual players, then there are people who want to try ranked, and then there are the extremely high level that we’re seeing right now. Are there any plans for how to incentivise and train people to go from casual to ranked, from ranked to competitive scene, and what responsibility do you feel that you should be helping to train these people and how you would do that? There’s almost two aspects on your question. One aspect is how we take a dedicated bunch of players and help them go through the different steps if they have the will to become potentially pro or semi-pro. I think the PC structure for next year that has a community or grass-roots level of competition, almost anyone can join, it’s easy, etcetera. Then there’s a challenger league that is one step beyond with the bigger prize money, and a limited number of teams, now you start having a responsibility as a team and as a player to show up for matches, be on time. There’s a whole process of growing you as a potential athlete. And then, obviously, the pro league which is the top of the thing. So we are starting to structure the thing with more layers to help more people getting in and potentially getting to the top. That being said, even in the wildest dreams you can have, you would never have even the grass roots competition that are happening on the weekend and the tournaments, you’ll never have one million players getting in. It takes a certain dedication, mindset, they are competitive people that are willing to sacrifice, do tournaments, take their computers and go to a LAN, for instance, and some that are not in that vein. I do play soccer with my friends once in a while, I’m not practicing soccer in a club with matches and training and practice, so there is already, I think, in the players there’s a natural selection or difference, should I say. To me, back to your sort of question of how or the larger question, to how we on-board people to get better in the game, regardless of most of the competition, this is a clinical question. And how we attract more players knowing that the game is deeper, richer, so sometimes it’s almost more complex for newcomers, and that’s clearly a challenge for newcomers we face next year and we’ll have to find solutions, and we have the discussions. I think we have interesting avenues that we can go. We haven’t made any decisions at the moment, but this is very likely to be the biggest challenge we will face moving forward.

Do you have a timeline for the transition away from the peer-to-peer systems to the client-server system and, once that’s done, do you foresee that having a big impact on the competitive scene and the ability for there to be online tournaments? AM: This is pretty much going to be over and across the whole year, starting with the 5.2 [patch] which is season one Reinforcement, mid-season Reinforcement, sorry, the mid-season. One of the aspects in the tech road map that we’re putting this year is we are pushing the tech features on the mid-season and not at the beginning of the season with the content. That will help us and that’s going to make it cleaner overall for everyone. So the roadmap of migrating to all the second line services from peer-to-peer to pure client-server starting mid-season one and that’s going to go over the whole year, service by service.

What are some of the bigger requests that you’re getting from the competitive players that are here today for feature or support in Rainbow Six Siege? AM: Most of them, the top three, it’s regarding overall what we’ve called health, so hit registration, matchmaking stability, connection overall. So something that they’re obviously because they’re playing so many hours, that would expose much more often I would say than someone who just plays an hour, so that’s the main, main aspect for them. Then when it comes to content or ideas, usually the number one discussion we’re having is about the state of the meta and what’s not balanced enough, so that’s tonnes of discussion about the operators, about the guns, about every of the values on every of the aspects of the game, so that’s a lot of the iterative process, and now we’re starting seeing, it’s more recent as a request, it’s those players saying, “Hey, I’m now at the top of the ranking system in Rainbow Six, I’ve reached the endgame, can we have like, a ladder, a leaderboard, or another extra step and keep on having that… and keep on doing and grinding and getting a lot?” So that’s something we’re looking at, yes.

You mentioned the meta, and that word seems to be used as a global term when we’ve already noticed some regional differences in meta between discussions with players and the different tactics that we’re seeing on the floor at the Six Invitationals. Do you approach meta balancing from a global point of view, or do you take regional considerations into account, too? AM:: So we are equipped and there’s a whole department at Ubisoft Montreal that’s a user research lab whose sole purpose is to look at all the data that the game is generating on every of our user. We know the operator they pick, the weapon, the win/lose, when they die, how they died. We generate heatmaps on every level of every game if we can. And this is that huge big data that we’re having on the game that we are looking and the research lab is looking and creating reports and bringing questions, issues, etcetera. So when it comes to balancing the meta, it’s not, “Oh, we think that.” It’s not, “Hey, someone told me this.” It’s pure cold data that you look at—the win rate, the pick rate, all of those aspects—and this is how you balance. Most of the time, in order to be sharper in our balancing, we look at the top of the players on PC, to be honest, so that particular population that we are looking at more closely to readjust our balancing overall, especially on weapons and operators, and from there we deploy to everyone, then we monitor all of the platforms, casual, if the choices we make looking at that sort of one percent if you will applies well and is not creating this balance.