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."

Comments

Don’t really get it

[DumbSwede]

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.

Re:Don’t really get it

[RogueyWon]

There's certainly plenty of evidence by now to suggest that games with review embargoes tend to be poor, or at least not as good as they've been hyped as. Aliens: Colonial Marines was the big example from last year - review embargo until launch, then reviews mostly in the 4/10 to 6/10 range (with a fair few even lower). More recently, Destiny (critical consensus "fairly good but not even close to justifying the hype") and Driveclub (barely works, and underwhelming even when it does work) have been good examples.

By contrast, when a game is sent for review well in advance of release, the reception is usually much more positive. Recent examples include Bayonetta 2 (reviews 3 weeks early in some cases, near-universal praise), Alien: Isolation (America hates it, rest of the world loves it) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (not actually released yet, but reviews near universal in their praise).

The lack of pre-release reviews is generally a very strong indication in its own right that a game is not going to be good.

Re:Don’t really get it

[Solandri]

More succinctly, if you're developing a game and you know it's good, why would you turn down free publicity before release?

No surprise

[Khyber]

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.

Re:Depends on Embargo Lift

[dj245]

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.

Quit buying games on day one

[MerlynEmrys67]

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.

Re: THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is ab

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is abo

[poity]

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.

Re:THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is abo

[ultranova]

Any game journalist who signs a review embargo agreement is a part of the problem.

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.