Valve is not yet doing anything about review bombing Assassin’s Creed Unity on Steam

Assassin’s Creed Unity has seen a significant influx of positive, offtopic reviews on Steam. This is due to the fact that the game is free for a week on Uplay and Ubisoft is donating half a million euros for the restoration of Notre Dame. Valve is not doing anything yet.

The game has gone from “Split” to “Very Positive” on Steam since April 16 in average recent ratings. Neither the automated nor the manual means that Valve can deploy to counter unhelpful reviews have been deployed at the time of writing to challenge the phenomenon. This while the graph shown with the reviews shows an unmistakably anomalous peak.

In other instances of this, Steam automatically commented on reviews stating that an abnormality was noticed. Also, manual curation, as seen with the Borderlands franchise, is not yet applied. Valve places an asterisk at the peak and the reviews with explanations and the offending reviews are not included in the calculation of the average rating.

Users take advantage of the review opportunity to point out that one must go to Uplay to get the game for free. Others go a step further and take the opportunity to praise Ubisoft for the amount of money they donate. Some users are more direct than others, but they all have in common that the reviews are not about the quality of the game.

User reviews are a strong motivator to buy or not to buy a product. Consumers and companies know this, so it is not uncommon to try to manipulate the system. Usually, however, it is more subtle than in this case.