Recently, the Russian Rainbow Six Siege esports scene has taken international lead. CIS-based teams successfully compete with their European counterparts, even occupying the top lines in the international championships. But what about the region’s own league? Today we will talk about the Russian Major League.
The Russian Major League was founded not so long ago, in October 2018, and four seasons have already taken place since then. It should be noted that this league is also included in the ESL European National Leagues tournament list.
The series' last tournament was quite successful. Happening during the quarantine, it was able to satisfy the spectator interest of the Russian fans.
The fourth season has reached 6.6K peak viewers, which exceeds the last season's mark of 2.5K peak viewers by 153%. Meanwhile, the event has attracted 1.4K average viewers, which is an 83% improvement over the respective indicator of the previous event.
When comparing the league with its rivals, we should remember than the quarantine measures and the coronavirus pandemic have forced some tournaments of the European National Leagues to come to a full halt. At the same time, some of them have not yet run their full course – which means that for now RML can only be compared with the ESL Premiership Spring 2020.
Overall, both of these competitions are on the same level – with both the peak viewers and average viewers indicators of both tournaments differing by a mere fraction of a percent. This is quite interesting given that in Russia and the CIS, R6 is a far cry from the being one of the most popular disciplines.
The situation regarding the teams of the league is especially interesting. Closer to the finals of the championship, Virtus.pro has acquired the R6 Siege roster from forZe – while the latter, in turn, has acquired new players instead of abandoning the discipline altogether. Such a shuffling of players has brought the championship new viewers – with the "bears" being the advanced organization of the region and therefore having a large fanbase from the other disciplines.
Consequently, VP became the season's most popular team, nevermind that its performance was limited only to the playoffs – while the rest of the teams in the top have worked their way through the championship. Following it were the winners of the tournament's silver – Team Empire. This is peculiar given that before this the top spot in the popularity ranking and the respective titles were always taken by the latter.
The fourth season of the Russian Major League has turned out to be the best among all the tournaments of the series. Additionally, the development of the game's local Russian-speaking scene is still ongoing – and we hope that it will continue to please us with the further growth of popularity indicators.
