Atari, Ubisoft and more going after German pirates

The Witcher 2 developer CD Projekt RED recently came under fire for the aggressive, strong-arming, borderline blackmailing tactics employed by a firm it hired to go after pirates of their game. The developer received so much flak, in fact, that the developer ultimately backed down and “ceased” pursuing pirates.

The practice of tracing IPs in an attempt to catch pirates in the act, and then subsequently demanding the alleged pirates pay the developer cash for fear of having to pay even more, is unfortunately not an uncommon one–and it appears that CD Projekt RED isn’t the only company in the gaming industry doing it.

A report from TorrentFreak points the finger at publishing giants Atari, Ubisoft, Codemasters, Square Enix and many others, claiming that each publisher/developer has either directly or indirectly gone after alleged pirates in Germany demanding money, lest the company takes them to court.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun rounded up the games publishers/developers that TorrentFreak alleges have gone after pirates for, and they include:

Atari’s Alone In The Dark, Test Drive Unlimited, and Test Drive Unlimited 2; Techland’s Dead Island and Nail’d; Daedalic’s (and in turn LucasArts’) Euro distribution of Tales Of Monkey Island; Square’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Just Cause 2; Koch’s distribution of Techland games and Ubisoft’s Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Agrar Simulator 2011, as well as both Painkillers; Codies’ Operation Flashpoint: Red River and DiRT 3; Kalypso’s Airline Tycoon 2, Tropico 3 and 4; dtp’s Cities XL 2012; Aerosoft’s City Bus Simulator, Airbus X; and many others.

You can read more on the matter over at TorrentFreak (here), or at Rock, Paper Shotgun (here).