Discussion Hello Games being investigated by the ASA

[StuffandThings85]

http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matth...dards-authority-is-investigating-no-mans-sky/

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...dards-launches-investigation-into-no-mans-sky

So I guess this has gone far enough where Hello Games (No Man's Sky) is actually being investigated for advertising fraud. The behavior of Sean Murray is a bit odd, in that he spent months hyping up his game, then basically disappeared upon release.

Do you think this was the plan all along? Was it all a scam? He hasn't said much in the past month aside from announcing an update to fix minor bugs, not even addressing the main problems.

Maybe it's due to the fact that this is an indie game with a team of 15 people, and they simply weren't prepared for the demand and backlash. They also didn't have a 'proper' PR campaign as larger studios do. Murray may just have poor marketing skills and failed to get the help of a better team in that respect.

 

[Law]

My theory: They added a lot of features to the game, made THEMSELVES pretty hyped. But then as it got close to release, they were forced to remove a lot of features due to performance issues, or these features were just poorly coded or too buggy or didn't interact properly with the other features in the game. They assumed that they could scale up their demo builds, and they couldn't.

 

[ASR]

[deleted]

 

[MishMash]

I imagine it was unintentional, its very easy as an Indie dev to say X game will have X feature stated as fact. From my own personal experience, it really doesn't help you promote or differentiate your game when you say "well, the game doesnt have this yet, but it will do". So instead, you talk about your game will be in the future.

Its a classic case of an semi-indie team biting off more than they can chew. They probably had every intention of adding all the features, but performance concerns, budget/financial pressure/deadlines forced them to slash certain things. It's basically like 90% of early access games on steam, the important difference being, this game costs £40.

I feel that given the pricing of the game, its far harder to forgive the shortcomings. If this had been a £15/£20 title, it's a different story.

I feel that games are very rarely intended as scams, and often times when "developers disappear with the money", its a situation where they burn themselves out from the pressure of developing a game that doesn't live up to expectation, and need some time to re-focus. I feel that if I was suddenly told that I needed to release my game in 2 months, i'd panic, end up releasing something super sub-par due to rushing it, and feel both disappointed in myself, and guilty for having released something that wasn't in any shape or form what I intended, even though it wasn't directly my fault.

 

[Alessio]

I didn't play No Man's Sky and after reading about all this i don't think i ever will. I can see how many of these problems are so evident, though.
Until ASA doesn't actually cover anything we can't be sure of what's up with all this. In any case, what happened to Hello Games isn't justified to me.

Remember the common advice in this forum when someone begins to build a game: start small.
I mean, if you're not sure you can do some big thing with a game, don't do a big thing! Do something manageable instead. Because i don't care about your problems as a customer. It's not pretty do disappoint a fanbase like this! Very few people will be faithful to them again next time they do a kickstarter.
If that was really a scam, that's just bad for them: with scams you can get successful but only temporarily and you will not be satisfied aftermath. They just ruined themselves for a long time. Really, failing people's expectations is always bad, whether it was intentional or not and it's never worth it. Indeed Nintendo is one of the few videogame houses that don't have that mindset and indeed, while they may release few disappointing games for someone, they never release a broken game.

In the comment section of one of the articles i found this, that's just lol: