After the fire destroyed the cathedral in Notre Dame, Ubisoft gave away Assassin’s Creed: Unity following the tragedy. This created a spike in customers grabbing a copy of the game, and in turn a spike in positive reviews for the game. This was labeled as a “positive” review bomb since a whole bunch of people in a short amount of time gave the game a positive review. Valve decided to ignore this event, claiming that they don’t feel the spike in positive reviews deserves any kind of moderation.
The news made available via a blog post over on the Steam blog on May 21st, 2019, where Valve discussed the reason for the spike and how they wouldn’t be discounting those reviews like they do with negative review bombs, writing…
“In this case, the Notre Dame tragedy has made it so that AC:Unity happens to now include the world’s best virtual recreation of the undamaged monument. That’s a context change that could be increasing the value players are getting from the game, so perhaps the game really is better than it was before? Or maybe that’s unrelated, and it’s actually players feeling good about Ubisoft’s significant donation to rebuilding the monument? Irrespective of the reason, perhaps this is a short-term temporal effect? Should temporal effects even be included in Review Scores? If a game was heavily focused on a time of the year, like Christmas, we suspect we’d see it have Review Score fluctuations around Christmas-time, as more people bought it and thought it was better on average than people who bought it at other times of the year. […]
“[…] So, we’re not really sure what to do here. It doesn’t actually seem to be a review bomb in the way we’ve previously defined them, but maybe that’s just our definition being wrong. But even if we define it as one, we’re not sure whether it should be off-topic or not. The overall Review Score would decrease by 1.3% if we marked it, which wouldn’t have any significant effect on its visibility in the store (see the FAQ below for more on that). So either way, the game itself wouldn’t be affected by our decision.
“As a result, we’ve decided we’re just going to leave it alone. But hopefully, this post has helped you understand that thinking behind why we’ve ended up there. If you have any thoughts on how we should approach this case, or similar cases in the future, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.”
You might be wondering, “What the heck was the purpose of that post then?” and you would be wondering on the right track because it basically comes across as a defense from an attack that never happened.
However, the attack was more-so prevalent back when Valve first announced that they would be censoring negative review bombs. They hide the review bomb scores from affecting the review aggregate and white-line the results on the histogram so you can see how it would have affected the game’s score.
This came after publishers and SJW media outlets attacked Valve for not censoring review bombs back in September of 2018.
Valve acquiesced.
However, in the same way that SJWs asked for the censorship of review bombs, gamers asked Valve if they would be addressing positive review bombs? Essentially a game hit with a bunch of positive reviews in a short amount of time. As you can see in this case, Valve has a double standard at play, justifying that the percentage of people giving Assassin’s Creed: Unity positive reviews in light of the Notre Dame fire.
Thankfully some users called out Valve for this obvious double-standard.
It’s true that Valve is running damage control for not penalizing the spike in positive reviews.
If you look at the histogram you’ll an obvious massive spike in April after Ubisoft capitalized on the fires to promote Assassin’s Creed: Unity.
The hypocrisy is echoed loud and clear throughout the room, especially given that back at the beginning of April, 2019 Valve had suppressed negative reviews on Borderlands games when gamers used the reviews to protest 2K Games and Gearbox Software signing an exclusivity deal with the Epic Games Store.
Valve didn’t consider the boost of positive reviews from the Notre Dame affair significant enough to step in and penalize the positive spike, claiming that there weren’t many reviews from people who picked up the game due to the fire, but one of the very first reviews on the Steam page is literally someone praising Ubisoft for the gesture during the Notre Dame fire.
It’s interesting how Valve justifies that negative reviews due to a developer’s politics, DRM, or some other issue they deem as “off-topic” is grounds for penalty, but a spike in positive reviews renders a justification for the sake of bootlicking Ubisoft’s feet.
Anyway, this is just more of Valve’s double-standards and hypocrisy on display, just like their hypocritical stance on the games that have been banned and made their way to the Waifu Holocaust banned game list.
(Thanks for the news tip s_fnx)
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