Rainbow Six Quarantine won't become Rainbow Six Parasite, Ubisoft clarify

Update: Ubisoft has since told Eurogamer that Rainbow Six: Quarantine hasn't been renamed Parasite. While the datamine was largely accurate, that moniker is simply a placeholder name used by the publisher's internal teams. We can expect to find out what Quarantine's actual new name is sometime soon.

"While we recently shared that we will be changing the name of Rainbow Six Quarantine, 'Parasite' is only a placeholder that our internal teams use," a spokesperson explained.

"Recently, we ran an internal test for the game and some of its details became public. We can confirm this is a glimpse of the upcoming game, and we will share more details, including the official name, soon.”

Original Story: A report over on MP1st provides some pretty compelling evidence that Rainbow Six Quarantine will have its name changed, as Ubisoft hinted last week. Rainbow Six Parasite is the new name according to the report, and that image above is taken from a patch that has apparently been uploaded to the PlayStation Network. That patch info was sourced from a site that auto-scrapes title updates for all PSN items. You can see the listing for yourself here.

It's noteworthy that this is for patch 1.01, an "initial launch patch" according to the listing linked above. It seems unlikely that a patch of this seeming significance could even exist without the game being fairly imminent, perhaps more imminent than Ubisoft let on during last week's financial results call.

But then again, this is all speculation at this point, despite how very convincing the above key art looks.

Last week, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot acknowledged that a name change was under consideration for the cooperative horde shooter, because 'Rainbow Six Quarantine' probably doesn't scream "a nice chilled out time" quite like it did in 2019. Despite Ubisoft's quiet on the title, the zombie-shooting Siege spin-off is expected to release some time this year.

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.