Ubisoft have contacted us with an official statement regarding the hack earlier in the week which saw users gain access to the entire Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon game (and others) by using a simple text editor.

“We are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it quickly,” reads the official statement. “Uplay’s PC download service will be unavailable until the problem is fixed, but no personal information was compromised and all other Uplay services remain available.”

We’ll bring you further news as we have it.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon hasn’t even been announced for PC. There was a listing for it on the Steam database, but no release date (although a pulled XBLA listing claimed May 1). And yet, right now, you can open uPlay on your PC and trick it into downloading it for you. Then, you can play it to your heart’s content. Beginning to end.

This isn’t some half-assed beta. This is the full, finished game. It’s just sitting there on uPlay’s servers, waiting for the bigwigs to pull the switch.

Is this legal? Probably not. And just to be safe, I’m not going to tell you how to do it. By tomorrow morning Ubisoft will have fixed this exploit anyway. They’re not stupid, and in any case, that’s not the point.

The real point here is this: Ubisoft is off to a pretty poor start on its mission to improve its relationship with PC gamers.

Over the last few years Ubisoft has replaces a number of formerly vilified publishers to become the PC gamer’s antagonist of choice, with its – shall we say, unpopular? – DRM practices; delayed or absent PC releases for multiplatform titles; and shoddy ports. Its Uplay service is often resented as an unnecessary extra step of authentication, and its extension to third-party titles hasn’t gone down very well.

Worldwide director Stephanie Perotti says the publisher is aware of feedback and working hard to win back gamers’ trust by providing an alternative to existing digital distributors.

“Announcing all these partners for Uplay and a wider choice of PC games, it shows our commitment to PC, and we want to improve our relationship with the PC community,” she told MCV.

“We are always seeking to improve. We took a lot of that feedback on board. With every game on PC we are improving. Far Cry 3 and Assassin’s Creed III on PC were very high quality.”

I don’t think you can have too much choice. It is just another way to expose more content. At Uplay we are also offering all Ubisoft titles, more console content and elements that gamers are more interested in. It’s about offering more options and more choice.”

Source: MCV

In a surprising twist, today Ubisoft and EA agreed to use each others’ digital delivery platforms to sell each others’ various games. Presumably coming together in a concerted effort to make Steam less appealing, the two publishers will now work together rather than trying to cut each others’ lunch.

In fact, Ubisoft is opening its doors to all manner of third-party developers for the first time, including Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 1C Company, bitComposer Games, Bohemia Interactive, Encore Software, Focus Home Interactive, Freebird Games, Iceberg Interactive, Nordic Games, Paradox Interactive, Recoil Games, Robot Entertainment, Telltale Games, and Torn Banner Studios.

There’s no word on whether or not installing an EA game through uPlay will require you to launch Origin, or if buying an Ubisoft game through Origin will mean firing up uPlay anyway. Hopefully not, as that would be… well, the word “horrific” springs to mind.

Source: Press Release

DRM is one of the most controversial issues faced by avid PC gamers, attested to by the almost daily debates in our forums and our article comment threads. From the games that require always-on internet connections and registered accounts, to the content management platforms we now rely on to serve us new titles and keep older ones automatically updated, it’s obvious that we’re now stuck with it — at least in some form — for the near future.  But publishers are rapidly realising that given enough incentives, we’re willing to look the other way…

Ubisoft desperately want their Uplay platform to take off, and it makes sense; why advertise another company’s store-front when you could have one all your own? Why merely share in your profits when you could reap the entire amount for yourself? In theory this sounds like a reasonable justification, but in practice it seems that companies have yet to learn that competing with Steam is a tough row to hoe, and that their legitimate customers are the ones yoked to the plough. Here are the top five ways Ubisoft needs to improve on Uplay if they even want to hope to compete.

Ubisoft’s Uplay doesn’t exactly have a good rep with PC gamers already due to its tendency to go down at key times and leave gamers unable to play their games – but it’s about to get even worse. Late last night it was revealed that Ubisoft’s Uplay software came unwittingly packaged with a gaping backdoor: a browser plugin that Uplay installs into your computer during setup.

This browser plugin could theoretically be used to execute nearly any program through Uplay – indeed, adventurous users on the Ubisoft forums themselves quickly discovered they could quickly write scripts that used Uplay to launch Windows Calculator and other programs – and as such we’re being warned to update our Uplay software immediately.

Ubisoft jumped on the news quickly and have issued the following statement: “We have made a forced patch to correct the flaw in the browser plug-in for the Uplay PC application that was brought to our attention earlier today. We recommend that all Uplay users update their Uplay PC application without a Web browser open. This will allow the plug-in to update correctly. An updated version of the Uplay PC installer with the patch also is available from Uplay.com.” Many users are uninstalling completely until the problem can be verified as fixed, which might be a reasonable precaution.

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun