No Man’s Sky developer Sean Murray: ‘It was as bad as things can get’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
See bribroder link to the reddit page for an idea of how far what they claimed they sold was to what they were actually selling, and it will help you see that as a cautious gamer, if you actually went out of your way to specifically check for features shown on official release video and/or answered as yes/no question by the game's lead, you would still be fooled. The reddit comment matches direct interview answers with major missing features.
When you see two factions doing some major warring in space, and the guy present it as actual gameplay that's in the game's build and says "Like here, we're at the battle between two warring factions. I could join in, I could take sides." and then there is no fleet battles anywhere in the game, I have a hard time blaming the players for their expectations.
I strongly disagree with the crazyness displayed by a lot of people, and those that go as far as death threat should be refered to the police. But this is not a case of "rabbid fan attack dev who couldn't reach what marketing promised", he put his hand in the fire to grab dollars, he got the money and he also got burnt.
It was so bad, for a while valve made a exception to its refund policy specifically for no man's sky, so that players could refund it even after dozens of hours, because the dev was hiding behind the "you have not played enough, you will unlock it later in the game" trick.
I forget how many tens of hours I'd spent expecting to arrive at anything resembling what was alluded to in the trailers or demos. It was probably 20+ hours until I realized that the problem wasn't related to progression-locked content. I'd been swindled. No. More than that. I'd been robbed.
I was mad. Sure. But I was more hurt and disappointed than anything. I can no longer trust Hello Games or Valve. Hello lied to consumers and Valve, from my perspective, backed them up while allowing a select few to actually recieve refunds for the sake of PR.
I understand the desire to protect Developers from unrealistic backlash. You've got to draw a line somewhere which, after crossing, makes one ineligible for the normal refund process. I do think the placement of that line should vary by game (or at least genre) instead of the two hour hard cutoff Valve uses.
For a game like No Man's Sky? At the two hour mark I was still taking in some of the visuals and geeking out about what I thought was coming. I definitely hadn't gotten into any of the completely broken mechanics, lack of depth of characters/worlds, or any other out of a plethora of disappointments and outright lies Hello had baked into the game and its marketing.
So now, for most things, I refuse to pre-order. I might miss a few neat things that I would have gotten otherwise, however; I won't get robbed again.
You'd been swindled, sure. Plain and simple. Not robbed.
Letting anger and frustration escalate beyond the scope of an injustice isn't doing anyone any good. I agree though, a more judicial approach to refunds is probably warranted for a game that SO under delivered on the hype. This isn't in the same ballpark of a let down as Spore.
> "[But] if we hadn’t released No Man’s Sky when we had, and I was sat down talking to you now after we delayed it for two years, we would not have a game as good as it is right now"
It seems like Murray's argument is that misleading customers before the initial release is justified because the sales money allowed them to finish the game after launch. It's commendable that they didn't abandon the game afterward, but that doesn't really excuse/correct/justify the deception--which continued even post-launch. It's really unfortunate that Murray / HG get the "underdog" narrative when what they really did was a bait and switch.
Given that 90% of the issue is not "it didn't live up to what we expected" but "why is that guy lying about features that are in on release week", they probably didn't want to let hello games off the hook and screw players completly.
The business logic doesn't hold up well here.
This is not the first or will it be the last game to fail to deliver on promises, but the game was practically designed to sell around broken promises. The backlash was understandable, and simply more than they expected. My surprise is that the article doesn't read of regret for making poor decisions but more of victimhood like they didn't deserve the backlash.
The biggest thing they didn't consider about is the fact that there's a large subset of gamers that have tons of time but not a lot of money, so the money is incredibly important to them and when they're duped into buying something like that which drastically didn't deliver, they have a lot of time to spend to make other peoples lives miserable. Just imagine how angry these people got.
To the attacker, it is cheap, writing a letter/email/whatever that threatens someone's life is no more difficult or expensive than a Thank You-note.
To the recipient, however, the situation is inverse: When your life is at stake, you cannot afford to not take them seriously, because you do not know how serious the sender is about it.
That is a really shitty thing to do to someone.
Yet heaven forbid Netflix raise its prices by a dollar, or a restaurant, etc. There are so many miniscule investments that people refuse to make. Game company promising the world though? Wallets open!
Critical people were actively warning people this would happen, and yet everyone went literally nuts for a scripted cinematic.
The whole thing smelled from the beginning, because there's people showing demos, there's people showing cinematic, but Murray showed a cinematic with a controller on hand pretending it was a demo. That's, like, as red as a flag could get.
I'm glad the studio survived the whole con job, because the 500000 or so people getting sold on a dream actually made possible for them to survive to the NEXT patch, which is making me even consider the possibility of a purchase if the reviews are good and the netcode/servers are proven able to handle the load.
But a word of warning, this is just them doing marketing before a major patch, so I'd be wary of the article content given the suspicious timing.
That said, I wish people could live up to their mistakes instead of throwing death threats and harassing other people. For whatever Murray did, that kind of behavior is never warranted.
> We definitely messed up a whole bunch of communication
You lied at pretty much every interview to increase your revenue at launch.
I know a lot of people's advice is to fake it till you make it, but doing that in the middle of the spotlight is obviously just begging to get your day ruined.
old: "Idea" -> "hmm, yeah we could...{thinking out loud}"
new: "Idea" -> "interesting, let me look into that, check with some people, and get back to you" or "interesting, there are a lot of pieces to that, how would you prioritize this against {comparable item}?"
That said, it sounds like No Man's Sky team was performing unprompted brainstorming sessions during public interviews, which is really unwise and essentially inviting people to be disappointed...
Murray did survive a harassment ordeal and was a victim. Hello Games was held accountable and was not a victim - gamers who were lied to were victims.
This whole fiasco was at the pinnacle of the industry lying to consumers. Hello Games concentrated this practice and exploited it to deceive gamers into pre-ordering. The resulting fallout corrected this and it is absolutely justified that the worst offender bore the brunt of the consequences.
The game is still full AAA price but plays like an indie title. Their promotional content is not in-game and is deceptive. Hello Games hasn't learned anything at all and really doesn't deserve a pity piece such as this one.
Demanding money back, writing articles about game being bad, suing them, reporting them to authorities (lying in ads can lead to fines) are holding accountable steps.
Harassment is not "consequences", it is just another attempt to euphemism it away. A lot of harassment is not from paying people or wronged customers anyway, it is from people who like to do harassment and do it for fun. This excuse making is quite typical for gaming culture, but just leads to more harassment by next confident emotionally unstable assholes.
Edit for the downvoters: Where am I wrong? Do you disagree that he explicitly lied or do you disagree that people who issue online death threats deserve severe legal consequences?
"Obviously death threats are unacceptable [...] but [...]".
Watch his interviews - he talks about it being an MMO style game in some of them, where you can meet your friends and explore side by side. Literally claims the game is multiplayer and it is labeled as co-op before launch. Players buy the game and realize there is literally no co-op whatsoever on launch day.
Sean Murray was involved in the engineering efforts, and knew he was outright lying to the media. It wasn't like he was a detached CEO of a large company not engaged in engineering so he didn't really know what was going on. No, he knew all the features he claimed where not real. He flat out took advantage of all of his customers.
GP's word was "unacceptable", not "not appropriate", but I think yours is probably the better position for such a vaguely defined term as "death threat".
On the more meta level as one commenter points out how sometimes "death threats" can be used as a DDOS attack on a person, they can also sometimes be used to get undeserved sympathies. Making up alleged offenses is not new and many people seem to just take this guy (who we know is a liar) at his word that these vague terrible things happened that he doesn't want to go into more details about. (I should clarify that I don't really doubt that he received hate mail and possibly other communications that could be classified "death threat" by some people, this being the internet, and the people involved being gamers. But hate mail is merely inappropriate, generally speaking; it's rude. A specific piece of hate mail could be unacceptable, it depends.)
This whole argument is strongly reminiscent of attempts to discredit female game developers who were being harassed during GamerGate.
> Sean Murray received a lot of money and publicity based on very public and explicit lies regarding the tech of his game. Obviously death threats are unacceptable and the perpetrators deserve severe legal consequences.
Again, you're completely right. There should under no circumstances ever be any caveats in any way, shape, form, or manner that could be even remotely read to justify such horrific behavior.
It is also faintly possible that there might be other aspects of these events that may merit genuine discussion. Some people might go so far as to say that such aspects should be up for discussion independently of any horrific behavior that may have taken place.
Expressing this nuance does take some modicum of rhetorical skill, which not everyone has had the experience to properly acquire. With this in mind, it might be wise to consider if comments can be read charitably.
Hmmm, no, it wasn't a mistake, you lied. Many times.
He definitely doesn't deserve death threats, but I have no sympathy for him otherwise. Instead of admitting the promised game features will not happen, he chose to lie.
There is so much wrong with this cruel and unfair world, I understand how some people might want to cope through escapism. But when people get so belligerent about the creators and maintainers of fantasies, one has to wonder how much escapism has replaced the reality for these people.
I mean, who cares that Disney scrapped the Star Wars Expanded Universe in favor of their (imho) mediocre film sequels? The fans didn’t buy the Star Wars franchise - Disney did.
Same goes for NMS. It looked interesting until it came out and the reviews amounted to a collective shrug. So I passed.
The tragic irony to me is that as the relationship between the creators of entertainment and their fans becomes more toxic, the acts of the fans (or perhaps more accurately, jerks) serve to make these fantasy worlds as shitty as the real one.
i think it’s because they go to games for fun. if there’s a bug in a game, it ruins their fun. a bug in facebook— who cares? you can just come back tomorrow. and a bug in a saas product, slack or gmail is a reason to go home from work early.
How exactly do you reach the conclusion that gamers are entitled because they expected features explicitly said to be in the game by the lead designer and developer? Sure, gamers can be an ornery bunch, but in this instance Sean deserved everything he got short of the perpetual harassment and threats. He literally defrauded the people who bought his game, and that's not hyperbole.
I saw the concept of "open world, seamless procedural planets, wander around and gawk at the pretty scenery", and I was pretty much sold. Any promises past that were either obviously over-hyped, promo bs that could not possibly be delivered in time, or ads/interviews/videos that I never saw.
I wanted a modern take on Noctis, saw that NMS was offering something pretty darn close to that, and was happy with what I got.
This is not to detract from the misleading promotion, but I do think the whole thing would have been so much better received if NMS was published as the beta/early access procedural survival/exploration game that it so clearly actually was on release, instead of the AAA Sony/PS4 flagship must-buy that it was marketed as.
But it wasn't just 'misleading'; it was outright fraud. It wasn't "looks how awesome this feature is!" and then "oh, well it's not quite as awesome as they said". It was "oh, that feature isn't even in the game."
We’re not talking about salmonella lettuce or a blood test kit that doesn’t work or carcinogenic flame retardants here. This is a product of digital entertainment, with minuscule value to our overall society.
Nobody forced these people to pre-order the game or buy it on launch day. They went and bought it before the reviews came out. It is entirely on them as consumers for failing to execute due diligence.
So what if the creator lied through their teeth? Plenty of people enjoyed the game for what it was anyway. If an investor wants to sue for breach of contract, they can go for it. Otherwise, the consumers have no recourse. There is no fraud without a court judgement, just a bunch of pissed off consumers. It may suck but that’s the law. Change it if you don’t like it.
I know, but Sean did in the linked interview.
>We’re not talking about salmonella lettuce or a blood test kit that doesn’t work or carcinogenic flame retardants here. This is a product of digital entertainment, with minuscule value to our overall society.
What's your point? People shouldn't be pissed that he purposely lied about the game he was trying to sell us? Nothing really matters unless it's a life or death situation?
>Nobody forced these people to pre-order the game or buy it on launch day. They went and bought it before the reviews came out. It is entirely on them as consumers for failing to execute due diligence.
So it's the consumer's fault? Sure, I also check reviews first, but that's neither here nor there. HE BLATANTLY LIED. Why are you so eager to give him a pass on that?
>So what if the creator lied through their teeth? Plenty of people enjoyed the game for what it was anyway.
You're not a reasonable person.
My original point was and still is not to justify fraud, but to express sadness at the harmful lengths people will go to for their personal entertainment.
It's one thing to say "my pizza is the best in the world", and another to make tons of specific, concrete claims that are _simply false_ about the game. If you're not sure what I mean, see this Reddit thread which catalogs numerous statements by Murray, with source video or text, that were unarguably false:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...
I don't own NMS and have never played it. I think outrage is acceptable when people engage in false statements that border on fraud.
All I’ve ever really wanted to do is make video games. I have always been fascinated with the ways an interactive narrative can evoke emotions in ways that prior forms of art could never do. Fans of Spec Ops: The Line will know exactly what I mean.
But every story of games development sounds more depressing and horrific than the next. Hours are long, pressures are high, fans are ruthless, and keeping a job depends on your game selling enough to justify a sequel (RIP, Mass Effect. You deserved better).
I always hold out the hope that development in game making frameworks will allow bedroom programmers to eventually create games on par with the big budget productions we have today, but games development is so talent-driven and expensive, I have never felt that that time is near in the way we have been lead to believe about other futuristic technologies like self-driving cars.
I agree that much of the games industry is a zombie these days. How I long for the halcyon days of the Playstation 2...
You might also _really_ like butterflies.
My guess is the threats are usually made anonymously-enough that that would be difficult to truly expose those who made them, and exposing them would also expose how pretty much all of them lack any credibility.