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Comment by therealasdf | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why it's only No Man's Sky that's being investigated. What about other known games that came out below expectations and with misleading advertisements? Watch dogs being a prime example.

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ASA are reactive not proactive, it takes complaints for an investigation to be triggered.

Their standard punishment is "don't show the advert again in this form", this isn't a scary prospect for Hello Games.

> this isn't a scary prospect for Hello Games.

You're right, they have far bigger problems, I wonder if HG has a future given how tarnished their name is?

I feel sorry for Sean Murray, in hindsight he seems like a Walter Mitty character; big on dreams and when anything was suggested in an interview he let his imagination answer.

The new Peter Molyneux?

I didn't follow that debacle too closely, from what I understand Spore was too ambitious but at some level it delivered.

NMS on the other hand is just a badly designed game. Sure, there was hype and over commitment. However, the core game loop is so shallow it's borderline fraudulent.

You're thinking of Will Wright; Peter Molyneux's classic fame was Populous and Black and White, and recent controversy Godus.

Fable is the one that sticks out most in my mind. He's a very talented director and developer but I think by his own admission he hypes his own work beyond what is reasonable. I'm sure he was never doing so to deceive, but you can't talk about amazing features and then completely fail to deliver and not expect blowback.

thanks for the catch, I need to do a little reading.

The big take away for me, and while Sean Murray / NMS might be an extreme example... We view our babies very differently to our users / customers.

Maintaining an objective perspective through out a product's development is a challenge.

What I find funny about this comment is that Hello Games' office is about 2 miles away from the former office of Lionhead Studios.

The complaint, our reader tells us, was made not out of malice against this particular game, but rather a desire to make a larger point about the nature of the way he alleges customers are misled by gaming advertising

The trailers clearly say "captured in real-time" which leads the viewer to believe that is indeed the current state of the game (and games usually improve from their initial releases).

I think Watch dogs was a brilliant game. The story was also decent, but the brilliant part was that you could go into other peoples games, melt in to the city and stalk them, but they restricted it to only two minutes or so, and put up a radar and a warning message so players always knew when someone entered their game, witch totally destroyed the immersion. They could have spun off more into that game-play, like having to check the rear mirror to make sure you weren't followed by the police or secret agent.

They aren't investating the game for not meeting expectations at release. They are investigating whether the advertising being used today matches the product being sole today. So this isn't about hype. It's about ongoing false advertizing.

I have to believe that investigators have seen this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik

Anyone can complain to ASA.

Here's the page with information for consumers: https://www.asa.org.uk/Consumers.aspx

Here's the page that talks about what ASA covers: https://www.asa.org.uk/Consumers/What-we-cover.aspx

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