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Assassin's Creed: Unity Launch Debacle Pulls Spotlight Onto Game Review Embargos
RogueyWon (735973) writes "The latest entry in the long-running Assassin's Creed game series, Assassin's Creed: Unity released this week. Those looking for pre-release reviews on whether to make a purchase were out of luck; the publisher, Ubisoft, had provided gaming sites with advance copies, but only on condition that their reviews be withheld until 17 hours after the game released in North America. Following the game's release, many players have reported finding it in a highly buggy state, with severe performance issues affecting all three release platforms (PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One). Ubisoft has been forced onto the defensive, taking the unprecedented step of launching a live-blog covering their efforts at debugging the game, but the debacle has already had a large impact on the company's share value and the incident has drawn widespread attention to the increasingly common practice of review embargoes."
Not harassing women or minorities. Any game journalist who signs a review embargo agreement is a part of the problem.
I’m not really a gamer, but while game review embargoes may be bad, how-about you don’t rush out on launch day to get it.
One of the highest correlated factors to success as an adult is delayed gratification as a kid. How about we all slow down and not have to be first. The game will still be available in a week and you’ll know if it is teh luz or not.
Letter To Iran
Nah, the embargo agreements are perpetually tied to the right to review the next release early. Violate the terms? Well so much for getting any trailers on your site, assholes.
They released a half-finished game and KNEW it was half-finished. They'd hoped to ride on the sales and issue a patch later. They accomplished this with the review embargo, and they KNEW that was the purpose of the embargo - to allow them to get those initial sales out before the shit hit the fan.
There should be a lawsuit on this fairly soon, I'd imagine.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Correction: an indie developer having sex with people potentially involved with the review of her games while lying to keep the whole ordeal a secret from people she knows (including her boyfriend), among a whole host of other things that are kind of standard with bat-shit-crazy women. Yes, the whole thing was/is blown way out of proportion, but she is simply not a very empathetic victim to rally around. She's like the crazy ex that we've all had at least once in our lives.
It's one thing to prevent game review sites from playing one-upsmanship over each other by "leaking" early reviews (that are often incomplete and based on beta versions of the game). However, once you can buy the "finished" product, the only reason to have a continuing embargo is that you know the product sucks but you don't want to share that information.
Another strategy: Have game review sites flat out say that an embargo for a certain game is NOT lifting prior to the game going on sale. I know lots of NDAs have Fight Club clauses (you do NOT talk about the NDA).. but a clever game review site could probably get around that without actually saying "The Assassin's Creed Embargo Does Not Lift Until 11PM" or something similar.
Its astonishing to me that anyone agreed to operate under such an NDA anyway. 17 hours is sufficiently long that you could aquire the game, play it for 2 hours to get a feel for it, 1 hour to record a video, edit for another 2 hours, and then post it with 10 hours left on the embargo.
Any game company having their embargo end long after the game is available is just begging for trouble. Or they know there is a very serious problem and they can't or won't delay the release.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
For that matter, quit buying them the first month or two. Let someone else debug them and when the game is worth actually playing, get it. Heck by then 1/2 the time the game has dropped in price 10-25% anyway.
I have given up on buying games before the first major patch, for that matter the first few if I am really interested and the reviews are that bad.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
If that's true, where is the outrage amongst the GamerGate crowd? The BBC article was last updated nearly 6 hours ago so there would be plenty of time for it to be the talk of the Gamer Gate crowd and yet none of them seem to even care. As the person above me points out if you watch Twitter for #GamerGate it's not even mentioned once.
For once we have an article that has nothing to do with that idiotic subject and not only do you have to bring it up, but you also create a massive straw-man while doing so. Are you just trying to start a flame war or something?
You can always tell when a movie is going to be - uh, "good" - when they refuse to show it to reviewers prior to it launching in theaters. Likewise, when a game has reviews coming out before it launches, you usually know it's going to be a good game.
Of course, the big problem with games is that for some crazy reason publishers rely on "preorders" to establish launch day sales. You get things like 10% off if you "preorder" the game instead of waiting for launch day, or you get special DLC that's only available if you preorder. I don't understand why publishers are so interested in preorders. But it's yet another way of trying to get people to purchase a product before they can review it.
Now if you don't mind, I need to stop my rant about preorders so I can go back another video game Kickstarter.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Of course not. But a few people getting death threats in an industry hardly means the industry is messed up. It just means those people were targeted for a variety of reason. Hell, John Smedly had his plane diverted because someone called in a bomb threat, but people didn't raise pitchforks over that. They just took the 'blame the victim' mentality and joked about how he had it coming after killing Galaxies or whatever, which is kind of ironic considering they accuse others of doing just that to women.
Any major title is gonna see two things:
1. Patches.
2. Price drops.
So why not just wait for both?
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One side wants to address issues with the entire gaming industry. Yes that includes corruption, sex, bribes, etc.
The other side wants to scream sexist as loud as possible so no real conversation can happen.
It's the JOB of the media to hold these companies accountable and to be transparent when they cooperate with these kinds of things. When the media does its job properly, as in this instance, you don't need Gamergate to do anything.
The fault in your reasoning lies in that you're expecting Gamergate to take over the job of these news outlets and to do their work for them. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Gamergate will continue to scrutinize the media for wrongdoing, and point them out when they abandon their responsibilities.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
But then again, so is any gamer who buys a game before reviews are available. It's doesn't exactly take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that a company that doesn't want their product reviewed is probably not competing on quality.
That this is an AAA game and part of a succesful series simply makes things worse, since it means if the company wants to push some anti-consumer move - a new form of DRM, in-game advertisements, whatever - they'll do it here and trust the brand to overcome the backlash to normalize it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
In Fermi times Anandtech was comparing cherry picked OCed nVidia GPUs to stock AMDs.
"Trustworthy", give me a break.
Your citation is the blog of her jilted lover? A guy who is clearly not going to provide an objective or even truthful account of events?
This is why GamerGate has no credibility. The only "evidence" available is bullshit, and they just seem to think that repeating the same lies over and over will make people believe them. It's a thinly veiled excuse to attack women, nothing more.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC