Ubisoft Inaugurates Rainbow Six Siege Collegiate Esports League

A newly-announced collegiate esports league by Ubisoft is going to debut for Rainbow Six Siege players in the United States

Ubisoft’s Collegiate Esports League Focuses on Rainbow Six Siege

With collegiate esports shifting into the limelight, Ubisoft is pushing competitive video in academics to the next level. The company has announced a brand new collegiate esports league which will start in July 2020.

The Ubisoft Collegiate Esports is the namesake company’s first crack at collegiate esports.  To see the initiative through, Ubisoft is teaming up with FACEIT and will focus on North America at first. Just recently, FACEIT expanded into collegiate esports.

Calling all students! Announcing the first Rainbow Six Esports Collegiate program! Click below to find out more and enroll your squad today!

— Rainbow Six Esports NA (@R6esportsNA) July 16, 2020

The organization will feature competitors from all schools willing to participate in the region, but not online schools. All clubs that are interested will be able to sign up and participate. Ubisoft’s collegiate initiative will focus on local but also cross-continental tournaments.

There will be all sorts of events and activities surrounding the competitive season, including viewing parties as well as live events, interviews with team members and coaches, and more.

What’s the Current Structure of the League?

The league will have a regular competitive season that will culminate with the Rainbow Six Collegiate championship in which the schools will vie for a solid $30,000 prize pool as well as some hardware.

Ubisoft has already signed sponsors for the league, including Origin PC and CORSAIR peripherals. The championship will be different from the regular season. Teams who want to participate in the championship will be able to sign up for it in October 2020, but the full championship season will start in January 2021.

Presently, the league plans on only running in North America, because of the high profile of collegiate esports in Canada and the United States. However, looking ahead in the future, the Ubisoft Collegiate Esports may seek to expand in Europe or even Southeast Asia where grassroots and even school esports are very popular and therefore not without a precedent.

The Ubisoft Collegiate Esports initiative now has an official website where schools can start signing up. This is the second big overhaul in Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege’s esports structure, after the announcement of the new North American League and European League.

Meanwhile, Ubisoft has managed to achieve a significant global audience for Rainbow Six Siege with over 60 million players and positioning the game as one of the most played games in the world. By mid-June, Rainbow Six Siege had clocked in 42.8 million hours watched the time on Twitch, an Amazon-owned streaming platform, Newzoo reported.