Rainbow Six’s Stage 2 leagues maintain solid foundations laid by predecessor
With the regular season of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege's 2023 esports year over, it is time to look back and recap all the happenings as the teams gear up for the second Major of the year, the BLAST R6 Major Atlanta 2023. From here, the 20 qualified sides for the Six Invitational 2024 will more or less become clear as the calendar heads into the off-season.
The Invitational, the most prestigious tournament in the discipline, acts as its informal World Championship, with this being the first time it will be held in Brazil. It also marks the first Major event in the game to come to this South American country since the Pro League Season 8 Finals.
The 2023 season has seen a few tweaks as the much-hyped multi-year partnership with BLAST took off with a bang. The format now has two stages instead of three that the nine main regions (up from five) have to compete in and ends with the Six Invitational 2024. These nine regions are:
- Europe
- North America
- Brazil
- Japan
- South Korea
- Hispanic Latin America (LATAM)
- South Asia
- Oceania
- MENA
- Southeast Asia
Stage 1 runs from March to May, ending with the Six Major at the end of the fifth month of the year. After an off-season between June and August, Stage 2 kicks off in September and runs till November, when the second Rainbow Six Major of 2023 will be conducted. With the 20 participants decided at the end of this regular season, teams will go into an off-season from December to February before the Six Invitational 2024 kicks off from February 13 to February 25 next year.
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What happened in Stage 2?
When looking at the central competitions in the nine main regions, the Europe League 2023 Stage 2 was the most successful, ending with the highest watch hours and peak viewership counts. The Group Stage, Day 1 clash between Team BDS and G2 Esports was the most popular, hitting 37K Peak Viewers, coming as it did between two powerhouse sides from Europe.
Of course, as two of the most winning sides recently, they were bound to drum up interest among the fans and pundits. Regarding watch time, it was Team BDS with 288.8K Hours Watched that came out on top, while G2 Esports, with 30.1K Average Viewers, was the most popular side at the event.
These two teams also appeared thrice each in the top five list of most popular matches, proving why they might be two of the most followed Rainbow Six Siege sides today. It would be remiss of this writer not to mention that Russia's Virtus.pro won the entire thing, beating Team BDS 2:1 in the Upper Bracket Final of the Deciders.
Comparing all regional leagues in 2023 Stage 2
As was the case with Stage 1, no single team was dominant in terms of results or pulling in viewership numbers, as is often the case with lots of other esports disciplines. The fairly large pool of participants mostly gave good accounts of themselves, making the entire regular season a pretty fun watch for fans who tuned in.
However, the difference in formats and the number of participants in different leagues did play a part in how they did audience numbers-wise. In the top tournaments like Europe, North America, and Brazil, there were direct quotas into the forthcoming Major right away, with the other sides earning slots in the Last Chance Qualification events.
When it came to the less heralded tournaments like South, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and MENA, things were flipped as well. While the former two saw participants only battling it out for berths into different stages of the LCQ, the latter two handed out direct quotas for the Major to the winner. All this did affect how viewers perceived the competitions and their interests in the various stages of these leagues.
So, what changed between the two stages this season?
Europe's leagues did the best across metrics in both stages, with these numbers hardly changing much. Interestingly, most of the Rainbow Six Siege tournaments didn't change much in terms of the important metrics in stages one and two, showing a certain comfort and giving the entire season an almost settled look.
For example, the second-most popular league in Stage 1 was the Brazil League 2023 Stage 1, which only did 2.8% better than its successor from Stage 2, the North America League 2023 - Stage 2. Even when comparing the stats of the Europe events, there is not much to separate them — Stage 1 was higher by 16.3% HW, 19.3% PV, and 2.4% AV.
Interestingly, only four events from Stage 1 had higher watch times than their second-stage counterparts, despite the airtimes not really having any particular trend to them. Thus, in a sense, the season has picked up steam as it heads into the final Major and then the much-hyped finale: Six Invitational 2024.
As a result, when not counting the Major events and the Six Invitational 2023, the share of the eight most popular R6 competitions this year is 4:3 to Stage 1, with the lucrative Gamers8 2023 the only entry splitting them. What can be said is that Rainbow Six esports has seen quite a stable period across the first nine months of 2023, and the next two significant events closing out the season should deliver pretty high numbers.
Once the remaining LCQ events end, the BLAST R6 Major Atlanta 2023 will begin on October 31 and conclude on November 12. The top three will earn 350, 260, and 200 Global Points Standings, helping them a long way in their aim to qualify for the world championship, if it does come to that.
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