Ubisoft Caught Distributing No-CD Crack for Own Game

Someone at Ubisoft somehow managed to publish a patch for their Rainbow Six Vegas 2 game at Fileforums.com, apparently to help users who were having trouble with copies of the game that were downloaded from the Direct2Drive service. Hilarity promptly ensued.

As it turns out, the file that was made available was a no-CD crack created by the “Reloaded” group, which is usually associated with pirating games, including Ubisoft’s own. Users launched hex editor programs to check the file’s contents, and verified that the crack was created from Roloaded, but the actual origin of the file and how it was uploaded remains unknown.

In the unlikely, but possible chance that the crack was published by a rogue employee, I’ll tip my hat to you. Even if the true motives have yet to be discovered, more games should adopt a means to avoid using CD checks to combat piracy, because they are simply ineffective and the people who were unfortunate enough to have problems with their downloads should be reimbursed in some way.

Bizarrely, Ubisoft seems to have been caught distributing a ‘no-CD’ crack produced by a pirate group for one of its own games.

A user named Twingo on the site Fileforums.com pointed users in the direction of a crack made available by Ubisoft for the PC game Rainbow Six Vegas 2.