According to TechSpot, hackers disrupted the online shooter Rainbow Six Siege over the Christmas holiday, forcing publisher Ubisoft to take the game’s servers offline on Saturday and Sunday. The attackers granted each player roughly 2 billion in-game credits, an amount translating to an estimated $13.3 million in real-world value. Ubisoft has not called it a hack or security breach but is investigating. The company rolled back changes, which may have caused a small number of players to temporarily lose purchased items. Servers are now back online, but the in-game marketplace remains closed, and Ubisoft is reportedly not pursuing penalties against players who spent the illicit credits.
A Bad Time for a Break
Here’s the thing: the timing here is brutal. Rainbow Six Siege X is a free-to-play game. Ubisoft’s revenue comes entirely from people buying skins, operators, and battle passes in that virtual marketplace. The Christmas period is when you get a huge influx of new players who are often most willing to spend. And the marketplace was completely offline. So you have this perfect storm of maximum potential audience and zero ability to monetize them. That’s a direct hit to the quarterly earnings, no doubt about it.
Restraint or Weakness?
Ubisoft’s response is fascinating. They’re not banning anyone. They’re just rolling things back and investigating. On one hand, that seems incredibly restrained for a publisher. You flood my economy with fake money, I’m coming for your account, right? But think about it from a business perspective. Banning a ton of players, even if they spent fake cash, is terrible PR and shrinks your active player base. It also admits the problem was on their end—the players just spent currency that appeared in their accounts. If this was a backend exploit, punishing users for your own security flaw is a bad look. So this “restraint” is probably just smart crisis management.
The Real Problem Lurking
But this isn’t just about fake money. The broader reporting suggests this points to a major, previously unknown vulnerability. Someone found a way to access the game’s backend and manipulate core data at will. That’s terrifying. If they can inject currency, what else can they do? Could they delete items? Corrupt accounts? Shut down servers entirely? This “gift” of billions might just have been a proof-of-concept, a very loud and public way to show Ubisoft they own the system. The marketplace being down isn’t just about fixing the economy; it’s likely because Ubisoft has no idea if it’s truly secure yet. Can they guarantee it won’t happen again tomorrow? Probably not.
The Service Model Tightrope
This incident shows the double-edged sword of the games-as-a-service model. Rainbow Six Siege’s revival and massive growth are entirely thanks to that model—free updates, a living game. But that always-online, live-service architecture creates a huge attack surface. The entire business depends on the integrity of a few digital systems. When those systems are compromised, everything grinds to a halt. There’s no offline mode to fall back on. The revenue stream instantly freezes. For a company like Ubisoft, which has bet heavily on these live services, a vulnerability like this isn’t a glitch; it’s an existential threat to the product itself. They’ll fix this. But the real question is how deep the flaw went, and how many other games on the same tech are suddenly at risk.
