Rainbow Six Siege developers use Azure to deliver to 30 million players

French gaming giant Ubisoft is the creator, publisher, and distributor of games including Assassin’s Creed, Ghost Recon, Watch Dogs and Far Cry, as well as the popular eSports game, Rainbow Six Siege.

Siege, as it's known by its community, is a player versus player (PVP) video game which was launched in 2015 and grew to more than 30 million players, with 3 million of those engaged in hundreds of thousands of concurrent games each day.

Ubisoft is committed to keeping its games fresh and exciting. Sébastien Puel, Executive Producer of Rainbow Six Siege at Ubisoft said: “Every three months we add new features, so we’re constantly improving it. We are continuously coming up with new operators [characters], environments, storylines, and offensive and defensive gadgets. We are committed to making Siege fun to play for a long, long time.”

To keep the games fresh and to keep up with the demand from sophisticated players for visually richer and faster-playing games, Ubisoft has had to optimise its technology and turned to the cloud, where it could access unlimited banks of servers to power games. Ubisoft chose Microsoft Azure for its elastic scalability and its global data centre infrastructure, which is tuned for gaming.

“The player has to be very close to the servers to provide super-fast performance for shooter games,” said Puel. “Even a company as big as Ubisoft, with data centres around the world, can’t deliver global data centre coverage like public cloud providers can.”

Ubisoft was the first company to use Azure for a cross-platform title, releasing three versions of Siege simultaneously. “By using Azure, we were able to hit the Xbox, PC, and PS4 platforms with one development effort, without having to manage three code bases,” said Benjamin Azoulay, Live Operations Manager, Ubisoft.

“We want to use managed services as much as we can,” says Azoulay. “We rely on data enter experts like Microsoft to create infrastructure platforms that are tailored to gaming needs, so we don’t have to write platform code to manage decisions, such as which data centre players use. We’re happy to let Microsoft deal with infrastructure, so we can focus on creating world-class gaming experiences.”