Paris (AFP)

The mobile game "Area F2" questioned by Ubisoft for plagiarism has been withdrawn from the application stores of Google and Facebook, announced on Wednesday the developer of the offending game, two days after a complaint from the French publisher in the United United for infringement of intellectual property.

"We will deactivate this first version [of the game] at midnight on May 20," announced on the Discord social network the development team of the game in question, published by Qookka Games and published by Ejoy, a subsidiary of the Chinese giant. Alibaba online business.

"We are delighted with the number of downloads that the game Area F2 (AF2) has generated since its launch, placing it in the top 3 free games of the App Store in certain regions," said the message, which explains the withdrawal of the game by the need to improve the "gameplay", not to mention the complaint filed by Ubisoft.

The latter considers that the game, launched in early May, is a mobile clone of the latest installment in its franchise Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege (R6S), a famous shooter (FPS) available since 2015 on consoles and PC but which does not exist in mobile version.

Ubisoft had filed a lawsuit Monday in the United States against Ejoy, and against Google and Apple who distributed the title on their application stores.

"Virtually every aspect of AF2 is copied from R6S, from the operator selection screen (player avatar) to the final ranking screen, and everything in between," wrote Ubisoft in its complaint.

According to an analyst, the French publisher may be interested in publishing its own mobile adaptation of the game Rainbow Six: Siege in the next two years.

"Long dominated by occasional games intended for a large audience, the mobile sector benefits from the evolution of the computing capacity of smartphones and sees the appearance of more and more premium games, including Fortnite which has worked very well on mobile. , Call of Duty mobile or Mario Kart, "he told AFP.

According to him, "Area F2 was not a bad game. It gives a good vision of what could be Rainbow Six on mobile."

The publisher Ejoy Technology was acquired in 2017 by Alibaba as part of its efforts to develop its mobile games division in front of the giant of the Tencent sector.

Contacted by AFP, Ubisoft was unable to react on Wednesday.

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