Are They A Good Thing, Or What?
The recent Notre Dame fire had a lot of major repercussions. Mostly this was expressed in donations, memorials, and homages. Assassin’s Creed: Unity on the PC experienced a massive uptick in sales, thanks to the game’s incredible reproduction of the famous cathedral. In other words, it was a positive review bomb.
Or was it? A recent post on Steam from the devs goes into greater detail regarding this curious conundrum. Good or bad, off-topic user reviews are supposed to be filtered out of the overall score. Recent political developments or personal grievances aren’t supposed to be impacting your decision to buy or not buy a given game.
Yet the Notre Dame effect is different… sort of. AC: Unity has changed since most reviews went up. On top of that, the game now has one of the few virtual reproductions of the cathedral from before the fire. So, it can be argued that this is a relevant new detail to keep possible buyers in the loop about. Long story short, Valve has yet to acquire sufficient data to make any more changes to their review system. But it’s nice to know that they’re paying attention to these trends, good or bad.