Today, games are usually released for purchase both in stores (on CD/DVD) and online for download. The disc version of the game usually has a check built-in to make sure that the disc is actually in the drive, confriming that you’ve actually bought the game. Ubisoft‘s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 was no different, except that the downloadable version of the game also had this disc-check left in — clearly a problem for gamers who opted for the download.

Usually, online piracy groups release “no-cd cracks” that allow games to be played without a legitimate (or any) game-disc. These groups are violating the game developers’ terms of service agreements, and enabling the theft countless games — but, they write good code! So much so, that in order to fix the disc-check issue with Rainbox Six: Vegas 2, Ubisoft released a no-cd patch that contained code written by the piracy group named RELOADED. This was revealed by a user on the Ubisoft Forums.

The Register reports that Ubisoft had these comments:

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.

Followed by:

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.

In terms of TV and Movie piracy, it always striked me as pretty amusing that the industry heavyweights were so viciously going after a network of people who do all of the legwork in terms of encoding and distrtributing content (completely for free!), instead of finding a way to track downloads and charge end users for the content they enjoy. But this seems different.

I think that The Register’s article title sums it up perfectly: “Ubisoft pirates game fix from pirates” — a move that is completely in line with any mandate to deliver top-notch entertainment.