Embargoes on game reviews aren't necessarily bad for consumers. But they can be used in rotten ways.

Ubisoft released Assassin's Creed Unity, the latest in its ever-expanding historical action game series, on Tuesday. As is typical with major releases, early copies of the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC game were provided to certain press outlets with the agreement that reviews would not be published until a specific date and time. This, for the uninitiated, is called an embargo.

What was atypical in the case of Unity was the embargo expired at noon Tuesday. Given the popularity of midnight launches and all-hours digital distribution options like Steam, that means Ubisoft deliberately held back reviews until 12 hours after people were buying it. You might imagine this meant Ubisoft anticipated poor reviews. This seems to have been the case, given the reviews thus far.

Conversely, if Ubisoft expected heaps of praise, it might have set the embargo early so as to shout the game's praises from the rooftop ahead of its launch. This seems to have been the case with Electronic Arts' Dragon Age: Inquisition—glowing reviews hit this week, but the game doesn't launch until Tuesday.

Both scenarios are in the best interest of the publisher, but only one is truly problematic: giving early access to the press in exchange for an agreement to withhold information not just prior to the official release of a product, but for some time afterward as well. Note that I am not opposed to embargoes per se. In fact, I'm of the opinion they are a win-win-win for everyone, as long as they're not used in a manipulative way.

Embargoes on game reviews prevent a race to the bottom. Polygon editor Justin McElroy made this point in a comment on his site: Without an embargo time, "the contest for most highly trafficked review becomes 'who can poopsock the game and get some scribbles out there before everyone else?' That’s bad for you." Poopsocking would be the not-entirely-apocryphal practice of defecating into an article of clothing rather than take a gaming break.

And this is what would happen, metaphorically if not literally: Writers would be under immense pressure to crank out reviews in record time, to beat the competition to the punch. This would be hellish for the writer and lead to superficial coverage that is bad for the game's publisher and, most importantly, lousy for readers.

This probably is what will happen with another Assassin's Creed game, actually. As if one Assassin's Creed a year wasn't enough, this year Ubisoft released two full-fledged console games in the series on the same day: Unity for the latest consoles, and Assassin's Creed: Rogue for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. In the case of Rogue, no early copies were provided, outlets reported receiving copies of the game on release day but no earlier.

Gentlemen, start your poopsocking.

Some gaming sites like Kotaku have said they won't rush to meet an embargo, and will hold a review until they're satisfied that they've played the game thoroughly and experienced it as consumers would. That's why its review of Destiny didn't go up until almost two weeks after the game's launch. But McElroy noted in the comment that for websites that rely on big game reviews to draw traffic, that isn't going to work: "The fact of the matter is, readers don’t want a review days after a game has been released," he wrote. "Believe me, I’ve seen the numbers. By putting out a later review, we’re literally not serving the readers."

At Kotaku, Totilo noted that the Unity embargo situation has convinced him to end the practice of agreeing to embargoes that end after a game's release.

As triple-A games are getting more and more expensive, publishers and developers are under immense pressure to ship the game on time, regardless of whether it's been polished to the highest sheen. A perfect execution of an elaborate marketing plan is of the utmost importance: Get gamers interested with a big reveal, get enthusiast press outlets to write preview stories about carefully selected slices of gameplay, get fans to like the official Facebook account, cajole them into putting down a preorder at GameStop, and seal the deal on launch day. Always be closing.

A review, any review, is a monkey wrench thrown into this finely tuned machine. They are unpredictable, chaos threatening perfect order. Zak McClendon, lead designer of BioShock 2, summed it up on Twitter: "Rather than 'hiding a bad game,' review embargoes increasingly indicate huge pubs just don't feel they need reviews to help [with] marketing," he wrote. "It demonstrates the total effectiveness of the preview cycle for big pubs. Why risk losing control of your marketing right at the end?"

It would be nice to see an end to the post-release embargo. Ubisoft probably didn't intend to start such heated discussion about it with its Unity maneuver, but it has. In the meantime, it's not that "no review" automatically equals a bad review, but if you're at all concerned about it, there's nothing wrong with waiting to see how things shake out.