UBISoft, Pirating themselves?

[vamsi_krishna]

In a bit of an odd story, a user on Reddit is accusing Ubisoft of piracy against themselves. He provides a screenshot of the data files on the Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood official soundtrack, and it displays "Encoded by arsa13" in the comments. He followed up with a quick Google search of the username, which popped up numerous links to torrent sites.

It's far from damning evidence, but it's enough to raise some eyebrows. No comment from Ubi yet, outside of telling Eurogamer that they're "currently investigating" the matter.

-Gameinformer

[Faun]

Wasn't there a case about patched exe (Razor's) of a game distributed by Ubisoft before too ?

[ico]

Originally Posted by Faun

Wasn't there a case about patched exe (Razor's) of a game distributed by Ubisoft before too ?

yea, I remember that.

They published a "crack" as a patch for a game problem.

[furious_gamer]

^^ Ubisoft is famous for such news. BTW encoded by arsa13....

WTH Ubisoft is doing all these years then?

@vamsi, nice find man..

[gameranand]

Well when developers are tired then they can always take a rest and give customers what hackers have to offer but officially.

[NVIDIAGeek]

Pirates FTW!

[gopi_vbboy]

Ubisoft hypocrites

[gagan007]

UBISoft are notorious for such gimmicks...or maybe reality. They have no shame anyways.

[Piyush]

nice vamsi
i would love to see Ubi's a$$ kicked big time

[Liverpool_fan]

Originally Posted by NVIDIAGeek

Pirates FTW!

I wish the pirated copies had malicious code that actually BURNT people's graphics cards (i know it isn't really possible). That would have taught them a lesson.

[pauldmps]

^^ I think you didn't get that. Ubisoft is pirating stuff from others.

Last time they published a patch for the Rainbow Six Vegas which contained unofficially cracked files as an official update.

[gagan007]

I had once found a link to a patch file which was kept on ubisoft server!

@Liverpool_fan: When I was doing data structures coaching, my coach/teacher said that he has viruses which can "physically" damage hard disk. Though "in my knowledge" it is not possible but I can't ignore his geek-ness.

[Liverpool_fan]

Originally Posted by pauldmps

^^ I think you didn't get that. Ubisoft is pirating stuff from others.

Last time they published a patch for the Rainbow Six Vegas which contained unofficially cracked files as an official update.

Well that was reply to nvgeek, not this thread in general.
Actually Ubisoft are morons, their DRM policy sucks and incidents like these prove they are quite a joke. Would never purchase or play their crappy DRM stuff, will only purchase their games through Steam.
However I absolutely despise statements like "Piracy FTW", "Pirate till I die", etc. Pirate if you must, but don't be behave like "that". Otherwise you deserve a Gfx card or CPU being burnt. My 2 cents.

[Zangetsu]

Originally Posted by Faun

Wasn't there a case about patched exe (Razor's) of a game distributed by Ubisoft before too ?

I guess it was Assassins Creed...there r N number of groups out there...
Razor,Skidrow,Reloaded etc etc

[pauldmps]

^^ It was Rainbow Six Vegas not Assassin's creed.

[funkysourav]

Ubisoft will say in its defense
"How is it piracy if we own the product and its rights?"

its like shooting yourself in the foot, you get hurt and a red face
but no-one can accuse you of "Assault with grievous injury"

[gameranand]

Well their DRM does suck big time. Why the hell on earth do I need a constant net connection to play assassin's creed 2 when I have paid for it. Well but they do make really great story games so UBI rocks.

[Faun]

Hey, I got AC2 delivered from flipkart but damn thing requires internet connection and mine went kaput a couple of days back.

Rage time...cannot connect to internet using gprs in win 7

Ubisoft should I do What you did ?

[pauldmps]

Here is what actually happened:

A couple of years ago, game developer/publisher Ubisoft was caught using BitTorrent to download a crack from one of its games, Tom Clancy's: Rainbow 6 - Vegas 2, and released it as its own "fix". Creative users dug deep, and discovered that this "fix" was in fact coded by a warez scene member, not Ubisoft itself. Since then, the company has kept mum on the occurrence.

We can all forgive just one screw-up though, right? Well, here's a second. In the deluxe edition for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, a copy of the soundtrack is included. Those who pre-ordered seem to have access to this before the game is released, and according to one user, there's proof of yet another Ubisoft piracy screw-up.

The ID3 tags for most of the tracks include the comment, "Encoded by arsa13", and that happens to be a member of the popular BitTorrent tracking site, Demonoid. Interestingly, when arsa13 uploaded the soundtrack, it was missing a single track - which is found in the final soundtrack Ubisoft gives out to its customers. Interestingly, that's also the only track without the "Encoded by arsa13" message.

Without much doubt, it does seem that Ubisoft has been caught red-handed once again for pirating its own materials. Even worse, though the upload to Demonoid was available in FLAC, Ubisoft encoded it to a lower-quality MP3 and then gave that to its customers.

What I want to know is... WHY? Why on earth would anyone inside of Ubisoft feel the need to procure the soundtrack in this way? Surely it can't be that difficult to simply, oh, I dunno... acquire it from within the company that produced it? Did Ubisoft lose the soundtrack before the game was released? It just doesn't make much sense!

But maybe ‘plginger’ is messing around, and retagged the files he downloaded from Demonoid for the lulz? While it’s possible, it seems unlikely. When arsa13 created his original torrent somehow a track was left out. The missing track is called Apple Chamber and, perhaps not coincidentally, the same track in the first screenshot above is the only one not tagged ‘arsa13′, suggesting it came from a separate source.

Source: Ubisoft Caught Pirating Itself... Again - Techgage