Smartphone gamers don't have a wealth of quality first-person shooter options, but in spite of its unoriginal name, Gameloft's Modern Combat games have been solid enough to lead the mobile sales charts. Ahead of the series' fifth release, Gameloft celebrated Modern Combat 5: Blackout's upcoming launch by awarding early free downloads to fans via social network contests.

As reported by Polygon, that move backfired when one of the contest winners cracked the iOS version and uploaded its IPA file over the weekend, allowing the game to be pirated in droves ahead of its launch. The news began to spread once Touch Arcade editor Eli Hodapp—the kind of gamer who would have early access to a mobile shooter—noticed thousands of players pop up in Modern Combat 5 multiplayer sessions during the pre-release period.

In a Facebook post on the game's official community page, Gameloft representative Florian Weber confirmed that this activity was due to the game's pirated leak, and he didn't mince words. "As you can imagine I am really pissed off," Weber said.

Gameloft followed that acknowledgment up with an official statement confirming that all illegitimate players currently playing in multiplayer modes "have been incapacitated." Pirates aren't perma-banned, however, and they can return to the servers by purchasing the retail edition, which launches this Thursday (and will presumably have a different version number to differentiate it).

Modern Combat stands out in the smartphone shooter fray not only for its relative quality but also its traditional price point of $6.99 for the full game, as opposed to a free-to-play model. Players and critics alike may bemoan a world of microtransaction-driven games, but at least those games force players to log in and pay to access certain content. Leaks like this are a solid reminder of just how many potential mobile gamers don't hesitate to download and install pirated files (in this case, even the need for iOS jailbreaking didn't stop the flood of early Modern Combat 5 players).

A cursory search confirmed that at least one Modern Combat fan, who goes by the username Rinkumiah, entered such a contest via Twitter, then attached his username to a public upload of the file in question.