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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

I think there is something very sad about people conducting harassment and sending threats to creators of....entertainment.

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.

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This is a major reason why I refuse to get into the video game industry. I read on TIL last week that the video game industry makes more than the music and film industries combined, and it shows. Every mobile game utilizes unethical or at the very least shady practices. Console games are slightly better in stability and quality but even more sketchy and ruthless. The industry is run by greed. Reading the story about how Minecraft started, before Microsoft bought them, that is a true inspiration. Make games because you enjoy them and let money be an afterthought. Is there room for that anymore? I don’t think so. The major players crush any competition. Read about Ketchapp. The video game industry is dead, no it’s a zombie, alive but dead, sucking the souls out of employees and customers alike, and that’s sad. But maybe it’s for the better. Don’t we already spend too much time staring and screens and not spending time with people right next to us?

I share your concerns. It was a dinky little text-based Visual Basic game at a summer camp computer area that got me into programming in the first place. By the next summer I was teaching C++ to Ken Levine’s (creator of Bioshock, nice guy) nephew. True story.

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...

Funnily enough, I hadn't payed any attention to the marketing or hype of the game before it came out. I just got a used copy at GameStop, and because I had no expectations, I found it to be pretty fun. If they had just marketed it as it really was, the reviews probably would have been higher.

My experience was similar, in that I mostly avoided the promotional content after I'd seen enough to sell me on the concept.

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.

>This is not to detract from the misleading promotion

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."

they also added a lot of stuff after the release, i think. they could've worked on it a bit more as well.

Some people are nuts, and threats are ridiculous, but you fail to mention the fact that Sean outright _lied_ about the game before and slightly after launch. This was not "poor communication", it was intentional deceipt.

I never said poor communication. My subject regarded the entitlement of expectations from consumers.

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 never said poor communication

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.

In your opinion, what’s the point at which “but there are worse things out there” stops making fraud permissible?

I did acknowledge that this situation sucks. Fraud is never ok, but neither are threats of violence.

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.

The maker of the game flat-out lied about what was in the game dozens of times. This isn't on consumers.

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.

great comment. as an independent game developer i’ve noticed similar things about game players. they are more entitled than saas product users for some reason.

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.

>great comment. as an independent game developer i’ve noticed similar things about game players. they are more entitled than saas product users for some reason.

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.

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