Valve looks into the recent Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s positive review bombing and decides that it should be left alone in their recent blog post.
This happened due to Ubisoft’s response to the Notre Dame tragedy in which they donated 500,000 Euros to restore Notre-Dame. In addition they had Assassin’s Creed: Unity be available for free for a limited time, giving rise to Unity’s popularity on Steam.
As the numbers of players actually increased during the “Review Bombing” of the game, and upon inspection, many of the reviews saying that, “most just look like standard reviews of a new player, or a player that’s returning to a product they bought a while ago. Also during the investigation, they found that players are indeed finding themselves genuinely enjoying the game.
Valve then explains that this review bomb doesn’t fit their 2017’s community terminology, as back then Review Bombs were aimed at giving negative reviews to games, whether they deserve it or not. In this case they looked at the possibilities to consider the review-bombing as off-topic for the game.
“When thinking about whether it’s off-topic, we often ask ourselves if the “general” Steam customer browsing the store would be better served if the Review Scores included the reviews. We don’t want players buying games they don’t have fun with, because that’s not good for any of us in the industry, so we want that Review Score to be as useful as possible.”
They went ahead and considered the political context around the review bombs, as the Notre Dame tragedy is what caused the game’s popularity to rise in the first place.
“If visiting the virtual Notre Dame is a reason players have reviewing the game more positively, we’d expect the Review Score to continue to reflect it in the future, albeit at a lower volume. But that’s sill the case even if it’s not the reason – the future Review Score would revert to where it was prior to this event.”
Due to the many variables that come within Valve’s definition for Review Bombing, they simply decided to leave it alone as it is found to not be an issue.
To read the full blog post and FAQ, read here.
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