Valve on Assassin's Creed, Notre Dame and positive review bombing

When Valve implemented Steam’s anti-review-bombing policy in March – manual exclusion of “off topic” review clusters from a game’s overall score – they’d not given much thought to what a ‘positive’ review bomb could look like. Just one month later, Notre Dame cathedral goes up in holy smoke and Ubisoft bring in a flood of positive press (and reviews) for Assassin’s Creed Unity through a Uplay giveaway and a half-million-dollar donation to help rebuild the landmark. This has led Valve to a rare bit of public introspection on how they should even define “off-topic”, shared in this official blog post.

(more…)