Another controversy arises for Ubisoft following the release for "Assassin's Creed: Origins," as it has been discovered that the game's Metacritic score has been fabricated with dozens of fake positive review accounts.
Following the digital management rights (DRM) issue, where Ubisoft was accused of purposely crippling the PC users' processor just to protect the game from anti-piracy, "Assassin's Creed: Origins" is yet again in deep controversy. A barrage of fake user reviews giving positive scores to the game has been discovered. Kitguru stated the bots were even too conspicuous since their usernames appeared randomly generated, and the reviews were also poorly written.
One review, which read "OMG, this game is so amazing and has most beautiful graphic.. gameplay/combat is great.. Bayek is awesome character.. i didn't notice anything weird yet.. story is very interesting.. Keep up Great job Ashraf Ismail !!!!!! i am enjoying every minutes of it," was posted several times on the website, with just some interchanged words.
These contribute to the overall user score of the game, consequently raising them, invalidating the legitimate reviews and scores from real users. Despite this, the aggregate critic score for the game is unaffected and still shows press and game critic scores and reviews, which is half the consideration for a game when looking at a Metacritic rating.
Metacritic head Marc Doyle has also stated that this incident does happen for approximately 2-3 games each year, but they have always responded with countermeasures and always try to fix the issue. They do this by suspending suspicious accounts with only one review present. Other than that, their moderators ensure that the reviews and ratings remain balanced and untainted by bots and other toxic behavior.
As of now, there are no reports yet on who was responsible for the said fake reviews, though their existence is quite common on the internet. Ubisoft has also not commented on the issue yet.
