Practise of plagiarism in the Far East is nothing new.
During the last decade, we've seen a lot of popular western games being directly copied and distributed with a different name on the Chinese market.
Games like Overwatch, Counter-Strike, Hearthstone, League of Legends, etc, all have their Chinese knockoff versions, often several of them and often blatant copies that are using same models, sounds, art and other assets, without even trying to hide the fact that they are copying the game.
Legend of Titan was a famous Overwatch rip-off from a few years ago (Picture: N/A)
Blizzard and their Chinese partner NetEase are fighting this practice for years now and trying to put a stop to it, but many smaller and indie studios don't have resources and time to fight for their games which are being stolen from some Chinese impostors, and often are forced to leave it like that.
The most famous example is the Clicker Heroes. The game was literally removed from iOS by Apple because some Chinese company made a clone of the game and acquired the trademark in the region despite the name already being in use by Playsaurus, developers of the original game.
Area F2 came out last month, and it already has 78,000 reviews on Play Store. (Picture: Ejoy Technology)
For the similar reasons of plagiarism, UbiSoft is now suing Google and Apple because they are distributing the game called Area F2, Bloomberg reports.
Area F2 is a mobile tactical shooter created by Ejoy Technology(owned by Alibaba Group Holdings), and if you are familiar with Rainbow Six: Siege, you will instantly recognize all the key elements and understand that it is basically a “near carbon copy” of Rainbow Six: Siege, which is what Ubisoft claims in their copyright infringement lawsuit.
“Virtually every aspect of AF2 is copied from R6S, from the operator selection screen to the final scoring screen, and everything in between,” Ubisoft says in the lawsuit.“Ubisoft’s competitors are constantly looking for ways to piggyback on R6S’s popularity and to capture the attention, and money, of R6S players.”
Players familiar with R6S will find out that almost everything is copied to Area F2 (Picture: Ejoy Technology)
Ubisoft said it has notified Apple and Google that Area F2 is infringing its copyrights and asked them to remove the game from the Google Play and Apple App stores. Both companies, according to Ubisoft, refused to do that, and that's why they are now being sued by Ubisoft.
You can check Area F2 official website and see for yourself what elements they "borrow" from Rainbow Six: Siege.