Ubisoft: Caught pirating its own soundtrack.
Posted: 2011-03-16 02:51pm
I hope you didn't buy the collector's edition of AC: Brotherhood on the PC.
This is kind of hilarious because it smacks of being lazy and unprofessional. I mean if I get a collector's edition I expect the soundtrack to be encoded from the source audio, not some half-assed FLAC transcode that might have all kinds of errors in it.Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is finally coming to the PC later this month, after hitting consoles last November. To make amends, the publisher is releasing a digital deluxe version of the game, complete with a wide range of extras, including a copy of the game's soundtrack. The problem? It looks like that soundtrack may actually be a torrented version.
As one Reddit user discovered after preordering the game, all but one of the soundtrack's 23 songs lists the phrase "encoded by Arsa13" in its ID3 tag. A quick search reveals several uploaded versions of the AC:B soundtrack that came packed with the collector's edition of the game on various torrents, attributed to one Arsa13.
So did Ubisoft actually take a pirated version of its own soundtrack to include as a bonus? It certainly looks that way, though the company doesn't seem to have much to say about it, telling Eurogamer simply that the situation is under investigation.
But this wouldn't be the first time that something like this happened. Back in 2008, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 users who had digital versions of the game were having issues, as the game required a disc to be playable. Ubisoft updated the game with a patch that allowed the game to be played without a disc. Problem was, that patch was actually created by pirate group Reloaded and used without attribution.
Ars has contacted Ubisoft for comment but has yet to hear back.