Rumor: BioWare Caught Writing Dragon Age 2 Review

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The controversy behind Dragon Age 2 is building once again: first, EA accidentally banned a BioWare forum user from activating his Dragon Age 2 game, and now it appears that a Reddit user has uncovered a Metacritic user review of Dragon Age 2 that was written by an engineer at BioWare.

According to Reddit user GatoFiasco, he became suspicious when he checked the user reviews of Dragon Age 2 at Metacritic and noticed that the review rated “most helpful,” (written by Metacritic user Avanost) read more like an advertisement than a review. After checking Avanost’s profile and seeing that he had only ever written that one review, GatoFiasco dived into the depths of Google and found a Plurk profile with the same username.

After jumping back into Google a second time to search for the person’s real name (which has been withheld here, just in case this all amounts to nothing), he found that a person with the same name works at BioWare as an engineer. To add more fuel to this speculative fire, once GatoFiasco blew the horn, the review was deleted.

So, given this evidence, it certainly seems like there’s an engineer at BioWare who is trying to give Dragon Age 2′s user review rating on Metacritic a boost. However, there’s a lot of things that the need to go right for this rumor to be true – specifically, the Avanost from Metacritic has to be the same Avanost from Plurk, and the person who created the Plurk account has to be the same one that works at BioWare.

If this whole thing does turn out to be true, then the question of ethics comes into play. On one hand, it’s definitely unethical for a company to write a review about their own product – a review that cannot be unbiased by default. On the other hand, though, it is only a user review, and one look at the other user reviews for Dragon Age 2 indicates that they probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

What do you think? Do you think the evidence here is solid, or do you think it’s all a bunch of speculation? Do you think that this is unethical, even though this is only a user review and not one being run in a major publication? Sound off in the comments section below.