Apple and Google are being sued by French gaming giant Ubisoft for selling a rip-off of its extremely popular game Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege.
The game in question is called Area F2 and was created by Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd.’s Ejoy.com.
In a complaint filed in the federal court in Los Angeles on Friday, Ubisoft has said that Area F2 is a “near carbon copy” of Rainbow Six: Siege where “virtually every aspect” is cloned from R6S. Bloomberg reported that apparently Ubisoft had notified Apple and Google of the game, but both Apple and Google have refused to remove the game from the App Store and from Google Play.
Ejoy, the developers of Area F2 describes the game as “The first 5v5 Close-Quarters Battle (AKA CQB) FPS shooting game on mobile devices.”
Area F2 was released to the public last month officially, although ads for the game have been circulating since last year already.
The similarities are striking, and Ubisoft has said in the filing that these similarities cannot “seriously be disputed.”
Rainbow Six: Siege has 55 million registered players from around the world, and the game is played by more than 3 million players each day.
Rainbow Six: Siege is also played as a competitive “Esport”, with many professional and semi-professional teams competing for millions of dollars in prizes.
Ubisoft has said that:
“R6S is among the most popular competitive multiplayer games in the world, and is among Ubisoft’s most valuable intellectual properties. Virtually every aspect of AF2 is copied from R6S, from the operator selection screen to the final scoring screen, and everything in between.”
Rainbow Six: Siege is based on Tom Clancy’s novel Rainbow Six and explores the adventures of a multinational counter-terrorism unit, codenamed as Rainbow.
Ubisoft claims that competitors are constantly looking for ways to piggyback off the fame and popularity of the game, to capture the attention and money of its millions of players worldwide.
Copyright law regarding Games is a complex and highly controversial subject, with many games being copied or cloned to capture audiences. These games are commonly cloned on mobile platforms, often skirting the fringes of legality.
Some elements cannot be copyrighted in the United States, such as game mechanics, but intellectual property and visual design elements can be. Hence why the suit focuses on things like the operator selection and post-game screens.
Only time will tell what comes of this lawsuit, but it definitely shows the gaming community that copyright infringement won’t be tolerated.