Ubisoft caught Pirating the Pirates

I just read this over at Thinkdigit forums. The story goes something like this :

Apparently people who purchased Rainbow Six Vegas 2 from Direct2Drive were facing problems while applying the official 1.02 patch and D2D didn’t seem interested in fixing the issue soon. Generously enough Ubisoft decided to go ahead and solve the problem in v1.03 of their patch. So what did they do? The just integrated the “RELOADED” no-cd crack into their patch!!

A user discovered this and reported the incident at the official forum. When the news started spreading the Community Liason locked the thread and issued the following response :

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.

While I appreciate that Ubisoft tried to help out D2D users (which they aren’t obliged to do), it’s pathetic that they were too lazy to write their own code and instead stole the work of a pirate! Ubisoft has always maintained no-cd cracks are illegal and even banned members for suggesting the use of no-cd crack as a solution to this specific problem. Talk about hypocrisy!

Anyway, this again brings me to one of my persistent complaints with game makers – why the heck do I need to have the dvd in my drive in order to play? I just never got the logic. It certainly doesn’t stop people from pirating games, as no-cd cracks are available for almost every game. All it does it that it forces legitimate owners of the game to use no-cd cracks (their other option being paying for 3rd party software like 5star Game Copy).