China has a Rainbow Six Siege clone for smartphones

Gamers accuse Medal of King of “plagiarism”

Video gaming

Josh Ye

Published: 6:32pm, 30 May 2018

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This article originally appeared on ABACUS

We’ve seen an Overwatch clone, a Pokémon Go clone, a Hearthstone clone and a truckload of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds clones in China. And now we are getting a Rainbow Six Siege clone -- on mobile.

Developed by InFunGame, Medal of King: Operation Rainbow (yes, even the name sounds familiar) is now out on public testing for Android.

This new third-person tactical shooter falls into a long list of Chinese companies cloning Western games and transporting them directly onto smartphones.

Within the first few days of the game’s release, some Chinese internet users have already put together a few side-by-side comparison videos online, demonstrating the striking similarities between the two games.

Like Rainbow Six Siege (R6), Medal of King also focuses on a 5-versus-5 battle format, in which a team of special forces soldiers go up against a band of terrorists. All the little tactical gadgets that made R6 stand out -- like grappling hooks and drones -- are found in Medal of King.

The Chinese game also bears a resemblance to R6 beyond game mechanics. The character aesthetics, the maps, and the in-game objects are nearly identical.

The similarity has prompted Chinese gamers to call Medal of King “an act of plagiarism” and its developer "shameless". The game is rated 2.3 out of 10 on TapTap, a game publishing and rating platform -- and InFunGame, a brand new company, is rated 1.2.

InFunGame apologized in a statement last week, saying it’s sorry for the fury it has triggered. But it also said that it’s “borrowing” elements from Western games to surpass them in the future.

The company said that they initially tried to make the game a battle royale but the genre has become too crowded. Having their back against the wall, they realized that tactical shooters, especially on mobile, are still a wide-open field in China.

These two characters are from R6 -- can you tell the difference from Medal of King’s? (Picture: Ubisoft)

But gamers didn’t buy the apology, accusing the company of “begging for pity”.

One of the most upvoted comments on Weibo said, “Let me translate this gibberish that the developer said: We know we are wrong but we refuse to change.”

Other gamers said that InFunGame is setting itself on a collision course with Tencent, which recently acquired a 5% stake in R6’s developer Ubisoft.

Tencent has said it will be publishing R6 in China, fueling speculation that the gaming giant will develop its own mobile version of the game just like it did with PUBG.

Ubisoft announced last month that R6 has passed 30 million players worldwide although it has not officially been published in China yet.

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