As most of you might be aware Ubisoft forced review sites to wait 12 hours until after the launch of the game to publish their reviews. In many of these reviews the performance issues and bugs were pointed out. It is possible that Ubisoft knew that the bugs would be found and wanted to keep that information quiet until after they had their initial sales. This is further backed up by the fact that they had a day one patch ready to roll out shortly after the launch. It would seem that they sent the game to the presses knowing it was broken so they could make the launch date and push out a patch after the fact.

Behavior like that is not going to go unnoticed and it has not. Facebook is full of rants and comments on how bad the game is and that Ubisoft (often called noobisoft now) might have done this on purpose. Remember that Ubisoft also was slammed for locking certain visual features out of Watchdogs as well as leaving out playable female characters in Assassin’s Creed because they were too hard to code. This is all in just the last few months so they realty did not need to have another media fiasco blow up in their faces.

So what has Ubisoft done about all of this? Not much really, they have made announcements that they are working on even more patches to fix issues in the game, but have not apologized for the poor game to begin with. They did try to drum up an excuse for the 12 hour review delay though. According to the BBC Ubisoft claimed that the delay was because of the complexity of the game and that there was no way to reasonably test the multi-player mode with the limited number of players that would have access.

This statement is pretty much garbage when you look at it. The game still has a single player mode that can be tested and will give potential buyers a look into how the game functions and what it looks like. The only reason we can see for the delay was prevent bad reviews from hitting the net and stopping people from buying it. Can you imagine the impact if reviews showing the flaws in the game were out just before or shortly after the game was made available for sale? It would have killed the first wave of buyers and the fact that Ubisoft is already talking about 2-3 more patches to the game to fix reported bugs points to the fact that they might have known how bad the game was and still moved to get it into the consumer’s hands and generate revenue.

This behavior is going to hurt Ubisoft so far we have seen quite a bit of consumer back lash on Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube. This has caused a pretty big dip in their stock and we might be seeing more people walk away from Ubisoft after this and other fiascos they have had this year.

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