These, ladies and gentlemen, are the perils of illegally downloading software. Ubisoft’s hugely anticipated title Watch Dogs, which comes out tomorrow (May 27) on multiple platforms, is causing problems for those that decided the anticipation was too much and pulled it from thousands of seeders via a torrent.
It’s difficult not to laugh at the irony of it all, considering the game is focussed on hacking, illegal activity and the consequences of committing crimes – both on a moral sense and in the visceral sense.
There are torrents for the cracked version of the game popping up all the time on the Internet, but some of these are riddled with a truly unfortunate virus: they turn your PC into a bitcoin mining conduit. Here’s the angry dude who first found it – all annoyed that he’s currently feeling the consequences of stealing software.
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Those that have downloaded the version of the game with this nasty little bug will find a file called “Winlogin.exe” in their system in no time. This will start running whenever their computer is on and it will drain least 25% of their processor power, replicating Winlogon.exe, which shouldn’t take anyway near the 25% the virus does.
Watch Dogs easily has the most hype of any game this year, with 2015 earmarked as the year the next-gen consoles truly flourish. It sees the gamer assume control of Aiden Pearce, a disgruntled hacker able to control Chicago because some genius decided it would be a good idea for all of the city’s systems to run on one OS.
The reviews aren’t out until tomorrow, because Ubisoft didn’t want their project derailed by the potential for bad reviews. But in al honesty, everything we’ve heard leads us to believe that Watch Dogs will be an awesome game. We’ll have a roundup of the reviews for you tomorrow.
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