Contest winners given early access to game, reward devs by cracking and releasing it to pirates

Modern Combat 5 has been cracked and uploaded to multiple torrenting websites over the weekend. MC5 is a first person shooter for iOS, Android and Windows 8. The developer and publisher, Gameloft, ran a contest recently and invited players into the game early. One of those winners apparently cracked the game and began distributing it online.

Modern Combat's dev team is not pleased with the situation.

"As you can imagine I am really pissed off," wrote Gameloft community manager Florian Weber on the Modern Combat 4 Hub Facebook group. "To anybody who got MC5 already, shame on you! We are making games for you and all you can do is pirate them?

"Anybody which is talking to me and shows in some way that he already has MC5 will get an instant ban. Seriously, this is why we can't have nice things."

In a formal statement Gameloft says that they say they are taking action to lock down any copies of the game that have leaked out.

"Following the release of several pirated versions of Modern Combat 5 prior the release of the game," reads the statement, "we have turned on our anti-piracy systems and now all illegitimate users on a non-official version have been incapacitated."

"Those who used this pirated version of the game just need to wait for the official game release which is on Thursday July 24. We will continue to stay alert and respond adequately to all hacking attempts."

Polygon has reached out to Gameloft for more information and will update this story accordingly.