Ubisoft Caught Pirating Itself… Again

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.