The recent release of Assassin’s Creed Unity and the following embargo, has launched a kind of witch-hunt on the way Ubisoft handled the review embargo. In short: the embargo was set to12 hours after the release, effectively making it impossible for gamers to know if the game was worth a day-one purchase, or if they should wait a few months.
It seems as if Ubisoft has heard those complaints and sent out a press release this morning, considering the release of The Crew.
The are stating the following:
The Crew was built from the beginning to be a living playground full of driving fans. Since the game is a huge online multiplayer experience, it’s only possible to assess The Crew in its entirety with a broad community of thousands and thousands of real players populating our immense open world – something that can’t be simulated with a handful of developers playing alongside press.
In other words: Ubisoft is screwing over the gamers again, by making it impossible for journalists to write and release a review for release-day. They are claiming the game is a huge online multiplayer experience, but in practice, you can only race with 3 others and all the other players are only for statistics. Giving out the code to a lot of journalists and big youtube-players would result in enough players to experience the “immense open world”.
Here’s the complete press-release:
COPENHAGEN— November 25, 2014 — With the launch of The Crew fast approaching, we would like to provide you with visibility on the review process.
The Crew was built from the beginning to be a living playground full of driving fans. Since the game is a huge online multiplayer experience, it’s only possible to assess The Crew in its entirety with a broad community of thousands and thousands of real players populating our immense open world – something that can’t be simulated with a handful of developers playing alongside press.
Consequently, The Crew will be available to all media for review at the worldwide launch of the game on December 2nd. You will receive your retail copy of The Crew on December 1st and servers will be up at 12.01pm CET. There will likely be a limited amount of players online at this time, however, we anticipate the amount of players will increase later in the day once the game has been released in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, we estimate that it will take roughly 30-40 hours to properly experience the game for review. We can provide you with several copies of the game should you wish to experience the online multiplayer features with your colleagues or friends.
In other words: We are not putting any kind of embargo on the game, but we just don’t give you the possibility to release a review in time to tell the gamers if the game should be bought or not.
For reviewers, it’s not that big of a problem; we’ll get the game, take our time to play and review it and tell you if it’s worth a purchase or not. The gamer, however, is depending on the reviewers to deliver a review before they purchase it and by doing it this way, Ubisoft makes it impossible for reviewers to release a review on time. We hope we will get a copy so we can tell you if it’s worth a purchase or not, but setting up this system is honestly not very promising, Ubisoft!