Rainbow Six Siege is getting a skin marketplace in the style of Counter-Strike

pcgamer.com:

It used to be the case that comparisons between Rainbow Six Siege and Counter-Strike ended at their 5v5 team sizes and bomb rulesets, but Ubisoft is cooking up its own version of a feature that's become synonymous with Valve's tactical FPS: the skin marketplace.

Simply dubbed the «Rainbow Six Siege Marketplace,» the website will allow Siege players to buy and sell in-game cosmetics with other players. In a presentation to the press, Ubi said the marketplace will be accessible from a browser and mobile, but did not mention integration with the Siege client itself or the Ubisoft Connect app.

All transactions on the platform will be made through R6 Credits, Siege's premium currency sold in packs costing $5 to $100 in the in-game shop. It's unclear if players will set prices for items themselves, or if cosmetics will have a fixed value. Theoretically, that means the Siege marketplace will have no connection to Ubisoft's NFT initiative, Quartz. Ubi will soon hold a closed beta for the Siege Marketplace ahead of the store's full launch sometime in 2024.

CS:GO's (now CS2's) item market drove massive interest in the game when it debuted about one year after launch, in 2013. Following this change, CS:GO became the most popular FPS esport ever and one of the most-played games on Steam. But the market also brought with it unwelcome issues for Valve and the competitive community: gambling and match-fixing scandals, made possible by the presence of a third-party grey market that grew around the game and used automated Steam trading bots to validate transactions.

Ubisoft hasn't yet said how it might address the possibility of these issues. The publisher says transactions are limited to R6 Credits, but if a trading system exists, grey