R6 Marketplace User Guide: Buy and Sell Rainbow Six Skins and Weapons
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six is one of the longest-running game franchises in gaming history. I remember playing the first installment back in 1998, and it’s still going strong today, especially Rainbow Six Siege. I never imagined there would one day be an R6 Marketplace though.
These days, it’s all about online multiplayer gameplay. There is an R6S single-player mode, but most people play multiplayer. To keep the game fresh, Ubisoft run 4 ‘seasons’ each year, releasing new maps, skins, operators, weapons and equipment as they go.
This is where the R6 Marketplace comes in.
Rainbow Six Siege was released in 2015, so there have been a lot of new items introduced to the game that people have collected over the years.
Using the marketplace, players can get their hands on old weapons from previous seasons, sell skins they no longer use, and more. This is all done using R6 Credits, and a whole sub-industry of trading items for profit has built up around it.
I will run you through how it all works below.
How the R6 Marketplace Works
God bless the R6 Marketplace pic.twitter.com/QQGSlL10cC
— VThicc (@V_Thicc) October 20, 2024
The marketplace works like a big queue, so you may not be able to trade the item in question right away. It depends how many buyers and sellers there are for the item and what price you are willing to buy or sell for.
If you want to buy or sell something on the R6 Marketplace, there are also a few criteria you need to meet:
- Be at least 13 years of age or older
- Be at least level 25 in the game
- Set up 2 factor authentication, recovery email etc. Security stuff.
Once you have your account, trading items is really easy. However, not every weapon and skin ever created will be available on the marketplace. Ubisoft control what can and can’t be bought and sold on there. So you may be stuck with that random face mask from 2016, but there is still loads to buy and sell on there.
Buying
To buy, you can browse or filter all the items in the marketplace until you find the one you want. You can filter by type, price and more, so it’s easy to narrow down your search.
You will be able to see the item details, last sold price, price range of all listings of that item, the number of sale orders and the number of purchase orders.
To buy, you need to make a bid, and once your bid is matched the purchase will be complete. However, to get matched you need to bid sensibly.
If you bid super low no seller is ever going offer the item at that price, so the bid will expire. If you bid too high you probably will get matched, but you’ll buy at the most expensive price. If you bid at the average price you might be waiting a while in the queue before you get the item.
R6 Marketplace will take the bid that best matches the listing price, but if somebody puts a bid of the same amount in before you (and there will be hundreds on popular items), theirs gets priority. So how quickly you want it, how many are available, and how much you are happy to pay are all influencing factors.
Selling
When selling, there has to be demand for the item you are offloading. If there isn’t, your listing will sit there untouched forever.
When setting a price, you need to be realistic. You can see the price activity of each item for the last 30 days as well as a percentage indicating how much the price moved on the last sale, so you can judge whether the price is falling or rising and set your asking price accordingly.
If someone is willing to pay what you are asking you will sell your item. Be smart here though. If something is worth 1,000 credits and has buyers with bids of that amount, but you list it at 500, a buyer will get it for your price not theirs.
The algorithm works like a queue as I said, but at the extremities, trades will go through more quickly as it also tries to match prices. It’s when lots of people are listing an item at the same price that things get bogged down.
R6 Credits and Fees
Ubisoft’s R6 Marketplace runs on R6 Credits, no real money exchanges hands.
Of course though, you have to buy R6 Credits from Ubisoft with real money, so they do have real life value. That said, there are different packages available with credits costing less the more of them you buy, so the value changes:
- £3.99 for 600 credits = £1 for every 150 credits
- £15.99 for 2,670 credits = £1 for every 166 credits
- £39.99 for 7,560 credits = £1 for every 189 credits
Ubisoft make money from the marketplace by charging 10% of the value of each sale, so an item selling for 1,000 credits would only see 900 credits sent to the vendor.
Ubisoft can’t do anything with these, but it slowly reduces the credits in player’s accounts so they end up having to buy more. Therefore, Ubisoft make more money from the sale of R6 Credits.
It keeps things safer for the players as well, but having an in game currency like this also creates a sort of side industry.
Trading Skins for Profit
People aren’t daft.
Players soon realised that using the 30 day price activity information, along with news about new seasons etc., they could buy items low and sell them high. Just like in the stock market.
There are people who scour the R6 Marketplace looking for items on the cheap, then they hold onto them until the item’s value increases before relisting them and banking the difference.
They have no intention of using the weapon or skin that they buy, they just see it as a way to earn ‘free’ credits. They can then spend these on the items they really want.
If players are good at this, they can buy credits once and then never again. They use the initial pack to trade and make more, and their balance grows and grows.
You also sometimes see items listed at ridiculous values. This is a way for players to transfer credits between accounts. For example, they want to send credits from account 1 to account 2, so account 2 lists something cheap at a price no one would ever pay, then account 1 bids that exact amount for that exact item. The sale goes through, and the credits move from account 1 to account 2, minus the 10% fee.