After the Notre-Dame cathedral fire that took place about a month ago, Ubisoft announced that they were going to be donating €500,000 to aid the restoration of the cathedral, as well as making
Assassin's Creed Unity free to download for PC users.
Because of this,
Assassin's Creed Unity — a game that got a very lukewarm reception when it first launched in 2014 — started getting reverse-review bombed; meaning that it started getting some overwhelmingly positive reviews the minute it became free to download on Steam.
Valve Corporation has recently revealed that they had no idea how to deal with these positive reviews; mainly because of it coming from a temporal effect that could've made these new positive reviews more subjective than before.
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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?"
The people over at Valve do make a compelling point, since there were external factors influencing these reviews, and those external factors make the new positive reviews objectively subjective — which don't necessarily reflect the overall quality of the game.
Valve then added that "
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."
What is great about Valve reconsidering their review system, to a certain degree, is that it will help make reviews for other titles more subjective and prevent certain games from suddenly gaining popularity, for whatever reason, that ends up making the reviews it gets more subjective.
In
Assassin's Creed Unity's case, the game getting positive reviews because of Ubisoft wanting to help Notre-Dame, as well as giving the game away for free, had a positive outcome — but nothing assures that the reverse situation couldn't have happened, or could still happen to other game, so it is great that Valve are looking into this to help keep those reviees as objective as possible.
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Assassin's Creed: Unity is currently available for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.