Tencent to make a China-compliant version of Rainbow Six Siege

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Tencent and Ubisoft are working together to bring popular multiplayer FPS Rainbow Six Siege to China (via The Loadout). Rainbow Six Siege doesn’t currently meet the standards and regulations required to be published within China, due to SAPP laws. This new development means the game could be coming to Chinese territory sometime in the future.

China banned virtual corpses and pools of blood not long ago, which made some games unplayable in the territory. Previously games could get away with changing the colour of blood to black, for example, but with the new rules in place games have to consciously omit these gory details. Siege is one such game that suffered the loss.

There was an update to the way Siege handled some of its more obscene situations, such as removing blood splatters on walls, changing its melee icon, and removing neon lights in the shape of an exotic dancer. The development team faced widespread backlash from its community in response and then issued this update announcing they would revert the changes after the community outcry. The backlash mostly argued that the game was being changed to fit Chinese regulation, although this was never confirmed.

As Siege hasn’t altered the way it deals with the corpses etc, it isn’t permitted for sale in China, but this development in working with the publisher Tencent means they already have ideas of how to tackle the issue. Currently, they are waiting for approval from the Chinese government and then will resume work on the project.

Tencent is also the company that helped launch PlayerUnknown’s: Battleground’s in China, so the have experience in FPS localisation for these sorts of games. It is likely Ubisoft wants to target China as it’s a massive territory to be excluded from at the base level, but also within esports.