On December 27, 2025, players logged into Rainbow Six Siege and found accounts they did not recognise. Credits that should have numbered in the low thousands were reading in the billions. Developer-only exclusive skins — cosmetics never intended for public accounts — appeared in inventories across the game. The in-game ban ticker, which Ubisoft had quietly disabled in a previous update, showed fake ban messages that had not come from Ubisoft. Within thirty minutes of acknowledging “an incident,” the company shut the game and the Marketplace down entirely.
Four months later, the Marketplace has not come back.
What happened in December is described almost everywhere as a hack. That description is accurate, but not the whole story. The breach did not expose a flaw unique to the Marketplace. It exposed what the Marketplace had always been: an economy built entirely on Ubisoft’s infrastructure, governed by rules Ubisoft can change “without prior notice” — one database exploit away from not existing at all. Players found that out on a Saturday morning.
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What Is the R6 Marketplace?
The R6 Marketplace is Ubisoft’s official player-to-player trading platform for Rainbow Six Siege. It runs through Ubisoft Connect and lets players buy and sell eligible in-game cosmetics — weapon skins, operator uniforms, headgear, charms — using R6 Credits, the game’s premium currency. No real money changes hands between players at any point.
The platform has no connection to any third-party trading site. Sites offering to sell or exchange Siege cosmetics outside of Ubisoft Connect operate outside Ubisoft’s terms of service.
The platform brought back items that had effectively stopped existing. Skins from earlier seasons — Black Ice, Glacier, Pro League sets — cosmetics with no secondary market — became available through an official channel for the first time. For players sitting on duplicates, or who had missed time-limited release windows, the Siege Marketplace was the only legitimate solution the game had ever offered.
How the R6 Marketplace Works
The system operates on an order-book model. Buyers set the maximum price they are willing to pay and the platform creates a buy order. Sellers list items at an asking price. Trades match automatically at the lowest price within the buyer’s ceiling.
Ubisoft takes a 10% Transaction Fee from every completed sale. Sell an item for 100 R6 Credits and 90 land in your account.
The rules that govern every trade:
- Orders stay live for 30 days before expiring and can be reposted afterward
- Players hold a maximum of 5 active buy orders and 5 active sell orders at any time
- Buying an item triggers a 15-day resale cooldown before it can be listed again
- Editing a live order resets its position in the queue — the oldest orders are always filled first
- Prices are not fixed. Every completed transaction adjusts minimum and maximum price limits automatically, within hard floors and ceilings that Ubisoft sets
To access the platform, players need:
- Clearance Level 25, earned through regular gameplay
- Two-Factor Authentication enabled on their Ubisoft account — mandatory, not optional
- No active account or in-game sanctions
What You Can Trade — and What R6 Credits Actually Cost
Not every item in a player’s inventory qualifies. Weapon skins, operator uniforms including Elite Sets, headgear, charms, and Celebration Packs from previous seasons are all eligible. Current-season items are locked until the following season, typically around three months after release. Base game content and Ubisoft+ subscription items are excluded entirely.
The Marketplace runs on R6 Credits, so their real-money value shapes every transaction. Ubisoft updated its credit pack pricing on June 10, 2025 — the first revision in close to a decade — alongside the Siege X launch.
| Pack | USD | EUR |
|---|---|---|
| 600 R6 Credits | $4.99 | €4.99 |
| 1,200 R6 Credits | $9.99 | €9.99 |
| 3,300 R6 Credits | $24.99 | €24.99 |
| 7,200 R6 Credits | $49.99 | €49.99 |
| 15,000 R6 Credits | $99.99 | €99.99 |
The previous $20 and $35 packs were discontinued. Higher-tier bundles now deliver slightly fewer credits than before. Ubisoft confirmed this in a May 2025 announcement, describing the revision as the smallest change necessary to sustain the game long-term.
Two Years of Beta, One Day to Launch
Ubisoft announced the Marketplace concept during a developer livestream in October 2023. Closed beta testing began in late 2023 with a small group of selected players and expanded in waves through 2024, eventually reaching over 200,000 players — roughly five percent of the active Siege player base at the time.
The full public launch arrived on June 10, 2025, tied directly to the Siege X update — the largest content overhaul in the game’s ten-year history. Siege X brought five modernised maps, a visual and audio overhaul, a new 6v6 mode called Dual Front, and a permanent free-access tier for new players. On Steam alone, concurrent players climbed from around 60,000 before launch to a single-day peak of 142,025, briefly placing Rainbow Six Siege fifth among the most-played games on Steam that week.
Two years of testing. One launch day. Six months of operation. Then December.
December 27, 2025: What Actually Happened
At 9:10 AM UTC, the official Rainbow Six Siege X account posted on X that it was “aware of an incident currently affecting Rainbow Six Siege.” Around thirty minutes later, Ubisoft shut down all game servers and the Marketplace.
Players had found billions of R6 Credits in accounts that held far fewer before. Developer-exclusive cosmetics appeared in inventories. High-profile accounts, including streamers, received random bans. The in-game ban ticker displayed messages that Ubisoft confirmed it had not sent.
Cybersecurity outlet BleepingComputer reported the breach is suspected to involve CVE-2025-14847, a flaw in MongoDB known as MongoBleed, which allows unauthenticated attackers to leak credentials from exposed database instances. Ubisoft has not publicly confirmed the technical cause. Cybersecurity firm Rescana estimated the value of in-game currency distributed during the incident at over $13 million.
PCGamesN reported this was not a single event — there were back-to-back breaches across the holiday period. Voice chat was also taken offline as part of containment.
By December 29, game servers were back online. Ubisoft had confirmed:
- No players would be sanctioned for spending credits received during the breach
- A full rollback of all transactions made after 11:00 AM UTC on December 27 was complete
- The ban ticker messages had not originated from Ubisoft
- A separate R6 ShieldGuard ban wave had run independently and was unrelated to the exploit
The Marketplace was not among what reopened. Ubisoft stated it would remain closed “until further notice.”
Ubisoft’s Response and Compensation
On January 13, 2026, Ubisoft posted a formal update. Account rollbacks were progressing. The Marketplace would stay offline until “later in Year 11.” Further information on its return would arrive “in the coming weeks.”
Players who logged in between January 16 and January 25, 2026 received a compensation package that included:
- 4x Battle Pass XP boosts
- Ten Battle Pass levels
- One Delta Pack, one Alpha Pack, and an Auric Mold skin for the P-10C
Is the R6 Marketplace Still Down?
Yes. As of April 30, 2026, the Rainbow Six Siege Marketplace has been offline for over four months.
The game itself continues normally. Year 11 launched at the Six Invitational in Paris in mid-February 2026, where Ubisoft revealed a full seasonal roadmap — Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid joins as an attack operator in Season 1 (Operation Silent Hunt, live since March 3), with a Dokkaebi remaster, the new Calypso Casino map, Ranked 3.0, and the Legend Division competitive playlist across the remaining seasons. Rainbow Six Siege currently draws around 108,000 concurrent players daily across platforms, backed by more than 100 million registered accounts over its decade of operation.
Third-party price-tracking tools including Stats.CC have suspended pricing data updates entirely for the duration of the shutdown. Players holding R6 Credits purchased with real money have no trading outlet.
When Is the R6 Marketplace Coming Back?
Ubisoft has confirmed the Marketplace will return during Year 11. The commitment is on the official Year 11 roadmap, last updated March 4, 2026, where the feature is listed as scheduled: “Complete rollout of the Siege Marketplace, enabling the buying and selling of cosmetics.” No season is named. No date is given.
Year 11 runs through 2026. Season 1 launched in March. Season 2 is the next major window. Community expectation broadly points toward mid-2026, though Ubisoft has not confirmed a specific timeframe.
When access returns, the entry requirements remain unchanged: Clearance Level 25 through regular gameplay and Two-Factor Authentication on a Ubisoft account — criteria Ubisoft has indicated it is enforcing more tightly following the December breach.
As of April 30, 2026, Rainbow Six Siege draws 108,000 players daily into a game that has moved forward without the economy built to support it. The Marketplace sits on the Year 11 roadmap as “scheduled” and carries no date. Players who bought R6 Credits specifically to trade continue to wait, on Ubisoft’s timeline, inside an economy that has always belonged to Ubisoft. December just made that visible.
