Rainbow Six: Siege has been one of the most popular esports titles in recent years with fully-fledged tournaments held for prizes worth millions the game is an absolute banger when it comes to competitive play and with timely updates and additional content it seems as if Ubisoft’s found a sweet spot in the esports club.
Naturally being one of the very few to actually have a proper esports game, Rainbow Six bears extreme importance to Ubisoft, enough importance to actually run a lawsuit over. Just recently Ubisoft struck a lawsuit over a “Ripoff” version of the game developed by the Alibaba Group. The lawsuit directly targets both Apple and Google claiming that the game itself has been an exact replica of the original and that it copies everything from starting operators, gameplay mechanics to even the start menu.
While there hasn’t been a proper response from the other side yet we can clearly see the resemblance and the fact that mobile technology has come so close to our full-fledged games that the resemblance cant go unnoticed. While Ubisoft clearly exaggerates on the situation, “Area F2” targets a totally different audience. In a world where competitive games have taken over the mobile industry, it is no wonder that the French studio feels threatened.
Not only is this to degrade the image of the original but would also mean that the word “esport” kind of blurs if we place this situation under fair usage. Seemingly a desperate move to garner a wider audience the copyrights are infringed yet the companies refuse to remove the game from the Apple and Google Stores. The situation as of yet remains disputed while we might expect a proper result soon.
