Oh Area F2, we barely knew ye.
For those who didn't know, Area F2 was until recently the self-described first mobile CQC FPS game of its kind. With an assortment of familiar-looking operators attacking and defending across also-familiar-looking locations, Area F2 was, assumably, intended to appeal to fans of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege by not-so-subtly copying pretty much everything and condensing it for mobile platforms.
Now, Area F2 can go down as the most short-lived mobile CQC FPS game of its kind, as the developers have announced that it is being taken offline. "We will terminate the service of the current version at 12:00 PM on 20 May 2020 (GMT+0)", the devs announced on their Facebook. Their specifying of "current version" leads me to believe that they might be considering a re-launch after enough tweaks have been made to lawfully distinguish the game from Rainbow Six: Siege, but that's speculative at this point.
Area F2's demise comes just days after Ubisoft issued a complaint to both Google and Apple, which asked them remove the game from their respective app stores. According to the court filing obtained by Bloomberg News, Ubisoft claimed that "virtually every aspect of AF2 is copied from R6S, from the operator selection screen to the final scoring screen, and everything in between."
It's not explicitly clear why Ubisoft opted to go after Google and Apple - whose app stores only distributed the game - in addition to taking legal action against China-based developer Ejoy and its parent company, Alibaba, but it likely has something to do with the country's storied history of disregarding western copyright laws. In any case, Ubisoft's strategy seems to have worked in their favor.
