Ubisoft downloads a crack to get around their own DRM.

Art's picture
Posted Fri, 07/18/2008 - 19:11 by Art

Apparently Ubisoft games (I don't own any) use DRM that checks to see if the CD is in the drive before it will let you play.

This is the case for Rainbow 6: Vegas2. This game is also offered on IGN's Driect2Drive store, sans the check-for-CD DRM of course. So, pay for the game, download the game, play the game without a CD, right?

Not so fast!

What happened with the latest update to the game was that they accidentally added the CD checking code. So now all the people who legitimately purchased the game from a web store were all of a sudden being asked to insert a non-existent CD before they could play.

So what did Ubisoft do to fix this? Why, they did what anyone would do. They downloaded a no-CD crack from the internet, of course!

Then they proceeded to distribute this crack as their own patch to the game.

Real classy guys, real classy. *Golf claps*

Comments

Mike's picture

Hmmm

by Mike - 07/18/2008 - 20:32

Pretty slick. I guess those no cd hacks are all out there anyway, why not.

Art's picture

Why not?

by Art - 07/18/2008 - 22:06

A couple of reasons why this was a slimeball thing to do.

  1. They downloaded and used a crack. A crack their very own DRM is designed to try to prevent. A crack whose author is no doubt contributing to copyright infringement as far as Ubisoft is concerned.
  2. Then they distributed this crack to all of their customers and claimed it as their own work. In doing this they become as guilty as the author of the crack. They also are only legitimizing the use of these no-CD cracks.

Unless of course you were being sarcastic. In that case, just disregard the above rant. ;)

Mike's picture

Of course

by Mike - 07/19/2008 - 08:13

Yes, I was being sarcastic. It's hard to tell though. I didn't think that it would allow my sarcasm tags, but it does. I'll have to make sure to use them next time.