Siege Copycats Subject to Ubisoft Lawsuit

If you hop on the mobile app store for Apple or Google Play, you see a lot of shovelware. Some of these throwaway games are actually direct copycats of popular titles. For example, typing in Pokémon into the App Store yields the following dupes:

Drakomon Masters
Pixelmon Craft
Monster Super League
Dynamons World

As you can imagine, none of these look or play particularly well. Still, mimicry is sometimes enough to garnish some attention. One example of this is Area F2, a Rainbow Six: Siege copycat on mobile. It’s so close to the popular Ubisoft title that the company is now suing Chinese-based Alibaba for infringement. One reason the game is doing well on mobile is that Siege isn’t on iOS or Android devices. Therefore, Area F2 makes the mobile experience of Siege possible, just in a re-skin.

So, what’s the actual issue? It’s not like tactical multiplayer shooters are solely the property of Ubisoft. According to the lawsuit, the issue is the extreme likeness to Siege’s “user interface, including its final score screen and the operator selection screen.” To be honest, they nearly look identical in style. To avoid a lawsuit, Ubisoft reached out to Apple and Google with concerns but neither responded to the request for a takedown. Now, we get a lawsuit.

It’s worth mentioning Alibaba is a mega-corporation not unlike Apple and Google themselves. There may be some complacency because all three companies likely know that a successful app is a successful app. If it’s not harmful to users and yielding a ton of downloads, then why ruin a good thing? It’s sort of weird thinking of Ubisoft as the little guy in this situation, but with Siege bringing in over $1 billion last year, it’s sensible they’d want to protect their IP.