So Rainbow Six Vegas 2 was patched earlier this month with a slew of upgrades and gameplay changes, all of it free. Unfortunately, it also inserted a disc check - big problem for those who got the game via digital download.
The fix? I mean the official frickin' fix? The Register says an Ubisoft employee uploaded a fix to the company's support site that was actually a hack written by software pirates to defeat the disc-check. Yeah, Ruh-roh, Rubi. And presumably that guy has stepped in Ubi-doo, as the company removed the executable and is "thoroughly investigating the matter."
Users on Ubisoft's official forum - where discussion of these cracks is forbidden and punished - alerted the company to the fact that R6Vegas2_fix.zip was actually a cracked version of the executable modified by piratcy group Reloaded. That begat some ironic, if not amusing, responses.
We're looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There'd be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable. As soon as we find out more about this we'll let you know.
[Jeopardy music]
Then, later Friday:
The file was removed from the site over a week ago now and the matter is being thoroughly investigated by senior tech support managers here at Ubisoft.
Needless to say we do not support or condone copy protection circumvention methods like this and this particular incident is in direct conflict with Ubisoft's policies.
How about that! They used a freaking file that was, technically, someone else's IP. So they pirated from pirates to defeat their own copy protection. There's a hall of mirrors of irony here and, to say the least, it's some major stank on Ubisoft. It would be for any game company
Ubisoft Pirates Game Fix from Pirates [The Register via GamersReports]