This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
For those of you who haven't heard already, there is a man who claims that the idea for the Assassin's Creed games came from his book. He is suing Ubisoft for stealing his ideas and plans to seek both monetary reparations and the blocking of sales of Assassin's Creed 3.
I'm not here to talk about whether or not this man is telling the truth or how much imitation is too much when using a similar idea you heard elsewhere. I want to talk about what some gamers are doing in retaliation. The man's book, Link, is sold on Amazon and a bunch of gamers have taken it upon themselves to negatively review his book just on the grounds of not liking his lawsuit.
This is not the way to go. Reviews are in a very bad place right now, with controversies over too many similar ratings among websites or writers not being unbiased enough to review it. The rise of Metacritic as a tool for determining a game's success amongst publishers has made the power of our game reviews even more potentially damning. We shouldn't be giving this man's bad reviews just because we don't like something he is doing.
No matter the medium (movies, games, books, etc.), a review should be about the quality of the product itself. If potential customers keep seeing reviews treated as nothing but a place to trash the creators of the product and not about the thing they are supposed to be reviewing, who is going to take them seriously any more?