Has Ubisoft Pirated Ubisoft?

An eagle-eyed and rather keen Reddit user has accused Ubisoft of piracy … against themselves. The user pre-ordered the deluxe version of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, which launches tomorrow, and checked out the extra files included with other bonus material. Noticing “encoded by arsa13” on the deluxe soundtrack, he referred to Google to learn more about the person’s identity. Turns out “arsa13” is a name linked to rips of the Collector’s Edition soundtrack.

There’s a screenshot of it here. Following the discovery, Ubisoft updated the soundtrack, switching the track order around and fiddling with the bitrates. Guilty conscience? Or was the track ordering really shifted around for good reason? Probably not, but some explaining needs to be done. Eurogamer received a direct response from Ubisoft, with the studio saying that they’re “currently investigating” the matter.

Is there anything wrong with stealing your own stuff? It’s lazy, that’s for sure, but Ubisoft has always taken a firm anti-piracy stance, and to do exactly what they condone is irresponsible and strange, in this case.

This isn’t the first instance of peculiar antics from Ubisoft. In 2008 they dropped a patch for Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 that removed the need for the disc to be in a console’s drive, but it was eventually confirmed as a NoCD crack that found its way onto the internet. Another story of piracy plagued Rockstar in 2010, when their Max Payne 2 launch on Steam contained an ASCI logo for a team of hackers by the name of “Myth.”