Gamespot recently dug up new details surrounding the lawsuit Ubisoft is filing against Optical Experts Manufacturing – the company they hired to produce copies of the PC version of Assassin’s Creed. Why are they suing? Ubisoft claims that OEM leaked a pirated version of Assassins Creed PC a full two months prior to the expected April release.

Ubisoft argues that Optical Experts Manufacturing allowed one of their employees to take home a copy of the game early, and that employee proceeded to post a pirated copy of the game on the internet six weeks before it hit retail stores. Ubisoft claims that in their contract with OEM, they set up a number of security procedures that included a rule forbidding any copy of the game to leave the manufacturers premises. Ubisoft states that they were able to trace the pirated copy of Assassins Creed PC back to the home of an OEM employee, and a physical disk was later found on the grounds.

When you look at the numbers it becomes obvious why Ubisoft is angry. Assassins Creed PC only sold 40,000 copies at retailers across the US – but the pirated copy was downloaded a staggering 700,000 times. Ubisoft believes that the event cost them millions of dollars. They also claim that their reputation was badly hurt with the release of the pirated copy, because programmers intentionally included a bug in the unpublished version of the game that would make it crash part of the way through for security reasons. They believe that some of the reviews done for Assassins Creed PC were done with the pirated version, and that all of the hype surrounding the bug – which was removed from the final copy – may have confused or convinced consumers not to purchase the game.

The final result? Ubisoft is suing OEM for negligence, breach of contract and copyright infringement – totaling around $10 million in damages for each of the claims. Ouch. Needless to day, we expect that the OEM employee who leaked the game is looking for a new job.

yea i would say that moron is indeed looking for a new job. 700,000 downloads of the pirated version shows that ubisoft puts out a good enough product. they have a right to be pissed.