Apple and its Android rival, Google, have unsurprisingly found themselves at the end of yet another lawsuit. What makes this particular lawsuit interesting is that the plaintiff is the French video game studio, Ubisoft, and its claim that the two tech giants plagiarised one of its games, Rainbow Six Siege (R6S).
The offending game, in this case, is a mobile game going that goes by the name Area F2 that is available on both Android and iOS. The studio claims that the game is a “carbon copy” of R6S and by most accounts, the accusation isn’t too far a stretch.
To be precise, Ubisoft says that “virtually every aspect” of Area F2 is identical to R6S. From the way its Operators are selected, right down to the way it displays the scoring after the end game.
For a bit more context, Area F2 is an online shooter title that was developed by EJoy, an app developer based in China and was recently purchased by Alibaba. On the Android platform, the game has been downloaded more than five million times, while the numbers on iOS still remains a mystery.
It has been pointed out several times online that the lawsuit does seem to be pointless; clones of popular titles are typically made small-time developers that have neither the people or resources of major game developers. In their defense, it’s a lot easier to work with a winning formula that has been tried and tested, rather than develop something entirely new from the ground up.
On that note, Ubisoft has already tried the soft approach by asking Apple and Google to remove the game from their respective platforms. To no one’s surprise, both tech giants declined. Only after was its request denied did Ubisoft begin the proceedings to take them to court in the city of Los Angeles. As the time of writing, the case is still pending a verdict.
