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No Man's Sky Under Investigation For False Advertising (polygon.com)
No Man's Sky is one of the most talked about games this year. The game sees the protagonist explore the space and experience uncertain places. But its controversial promotional material may also have played an instrumental role in making the title a sleeper-hit success. Polygon reports: No Man's Sky's promotional material has come under fire since launch, and it's now the subject of an ongoing investigation. The U.K.-based Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) confirmed to Polygon that it's received "several complaints about No Man's Sky's advertising," which angry customers have criticized as misleading. "I can confirm we have received several complaints about No Man's Sky advertising and we have launched an investigation," the ASA told Polygon. A representative for the ASA declined to comment on the particulars of the investigation, but a thread on the No Man Sky's subreddit details some of the most prominent issues Steam users have with the game's store page, which they passed on to the organization. Screens and video on Steam suggest a different type of combat, unique buildings, "ship flying behaviour" and creature sizes than what's found in the actual game itself. The store page overall has also been criticized for showing No Man's Sky with higher quality graphics than can be attained in-game.
Should force Steam to issue refunds for anybody that wants one who bought before that point though.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
No, I already bought it on the basis of those screenshots.
Anyone? Even people who put 100+ hours into the game? It shouldn't take that long to determine that the game doesn't live up to expectations.
Totally agree. NMS is really just the current culmination of years of rot. The whole industry is rotten - especially when pre-orders started becoming a big thing - with promise big and under-deliver being a common theme.
Of course, one could say that about a lot of the software industry in general, not just games. At least with games there are ads and demos which misrepresented the end-product that one can use as evidence.
The artwork on Atari 2600 cartridges boxes was never presented as the way the actual game looked and it certainly wasn't a gameplay video that showed things that aren't in the game.
"Maybe if I bitch and moan about something I really don't care about, I can get free money" - A lot of people
I think getting $1/hr of entertainment is a good deal for anyone wanting to get the latest game hot off the presses. Better $/hr than a movie is.
"You said this medicine would cure my cancer. I drank it, but it didn't work and I still have my cancer. When I sent the nearly empty bottle to the lab, they said it contained something called 'snake oil.' I demand a refund!"
"But you drank it! If you had return the product unused, of course we would issue a refund. But you have enjoyed the product."
"No, I haven't!!"
"Yes, you have."
It doesn't matter how many hours you put in if you were enticed by and promised things that don't exist in the game. You could love the game, give it honestly rave reviews, and play it every day for 8 hours. Doesn't matter. Your playing or not playing the game, or a better way to put it is, the behavior of the purchaser subsequent to purchase has no bearing on the advertising tactics and their honesty/dishonesty in describing the game. Money should be refunded based on the request of the purchaser because of the actions of the selling company previous to purchase. Everything that happens after purchase is immaterial.
Why? Because even if someone played the game for 400000 hours, they would never get what was promised in the advertising. IMHO the penalties should go up with play time. It means that person has been defrauded of the missing material more than someone who barely plays the game.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Look at how Atari games were sold... Think that image on the cartridge has any meaning? Remember Nintendo Power magazine? Remember like every back of box to every video game ever sold? More recently, remember youtube videos of every cut scene ever?
It's been so prevalent for so long, its now common practice for companies to embed "Actual Game Footage" in videos now because we've been lied to for so long.
Anyway from all accounts it was all very sleazy, sketchy, and douchy what they did. However... The ending not what you thought it was supposed to be? Remember Mass Effect 3?
I doubt this will do anything, even in the UK where the lawsuit was filed. The company is probably already toast, in reputation if not financially... yet.
The only game I ever pre-ordered was Masters of Orion 3... All this type of thing does is delay sales for the industry. I looked at buying No Man's Sky... But thought to myself, I think I'll wait until the reviews come out. Glad I did. Just more gamers reluctant to jump on new games right away.
Just waiting for Star Citizen to actually release as advertised...
Yeah...all due respect, but if you're buying a game based on the pre-release hype and some pre-rendered screenshots, you aren't making smart purchases in the first place. Hard to feel sorry for someone who doesn't have a healthy dose of skepticism about the games industry promising another "you can do EVERYTHING and it all works perfectly" title.
Sean Murray's only been doing what the fine folks at conferences like E3 have been doing for years now, pre-rendered lies and Molyneux-level delusions of grandeur, only to turn out a buggy piece of shit and collect the cash. It makes him a scumbag, yep. He deserves to be investigated and possibly charged for false advertising, because everything that came out of his mouth about NMS was pure, unadulterated bullshit. You know who else has been lying to the gaming fans for years? Practically everybody else in the industry, that's who. Valve was PROFITING from the very same until they caved to user demands and started offering refunds, not much different than the console manufacturers. The only thing separating Valve from Sony and Microsoft at this point is the illegal gambling, but I digress.
In fact the only thing I see different this time is the rage. All of this crap has been passed off as acceptable for far too long in the gaming industry, but this time people are shitting themselves they're so angry. Mostly vanity streamers who insist on chroma-keying their own acne-ridden face over the game they bought on pre-order flipping their lids. On the plus side, it might actually make some of the "triple-A" developers think twice about pulling the same thing...on the other hand we also live in the time that Ride to Hell: Retribution was actually sold to people as a game rather than an "enhanced interrogation method."
The purpose of advertising is to sell things to people that they don't need and likely can't afford, and that can't be done through truth in advertising.
Spoken like a crook. And there are a lot of crooks and snake oil salesman out there, and this is clearly within that particular genre. But the purpose of advertising is to connect people with a product they might need or want, and to convince them that they need or want it. At the end of the day, if I want to sell you product X, all I can do is talk about its advantages, and how it might help you personally, and I can do all of that without ever telling you a lie. You must decide if you need it / want it or can or can't afford it.
On the other hand, if I do lie to you, and tell you product X will do something it won't, then I have committed a form of fraud, and you have a reasonable civil tort against me. But a reasonable degree of photo manipulation may be expected due to the nature of the medium. Breakfast cereal, for example, is filmed with glue instead of milk because milk goes bad REALLY fast under the heat of a studio light. An image may be photo-shopped to restore definition or color lost in the process of photography. That doesn't mis-represent the product so much as it helps present the best-face of the product. I might reasonably want to show my video game sprites rendered by the best commercial hardware available, but if I render that at colors and resolutions impossible to achieve with currently available hardware, than I have committed fraud. And it seems the NMS developers have done that. /P.
Honest question: What else should I base my decision to buy a game on if not screenshots and gameplay previews?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Even in the age of physical copies, pre-order made little sense. If a product is successful, you make more of that product to sell. If your supply chain can't keep up with demand, you build more production capacity to capture that demand before a competitor does.
In the digital age, consumers have zero need to pre-order. There is no scarcity. If anything, publishers should thank their lucky stars that we still pay retail prices for a file that costs less than a penny to deliver, instead of blowing roughly half the sticker price on packaging, distribution, mark-up and overstock.
Pre-orders are basically rewarding big publishers for harassing us with obnoxious marketing campaigns.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I don't know....maybe wait for the actual reviews? Yeah, that does mean we have to wait a bit more when a new game comes out.
Admittedly, there have been/are games that I would pre-order, or get on day 1 or 2, but they'd be from some specific developers in specific genres and in specific series.
Bethesda, Bioware, Blizzard for example. Squaresoft in the past, but not today.
I wouldn't probably worry about reading console-specific reviews for games that got an earlier release on the PC or another platform and were well regarded. (Divinity, Wasteland 2, Day of the Tentacle, that sort of thing.)
I also tend to trust print or "traditional professional game website" reviews more than dudebro "pro" youtubers, I'd trust the opinions of some random gamer who only streams once a month or so, than bearded 20 year old who wants to be the next hyperactive PeePeeDie
You don't get your money back when a movie doesn't live up to the trailer hype (Star Wars Ep1??)
Sorry. That's the way life is. Stop believing the hype, and stop pre-ordering like a fucking moron.
More to the point, a lot of the statements made by Sean / Hello Games and their actions seem to have been deliberately designed to keep people in past the refund point. They spent a lot of time plugging the concept that there's "secrets" and "easter eggs", that planets / star systems get more interesting the closer one gets to the center, etc. Then - after someone managed to get to the center on the first day by grinding nonstop all day (the game is extremely focused on grind), their first reaction was to.... quadruple the grind with a day-one patch (introducing a distance-measuring bug at the same time). Basically:
1) Tell people that there's amazing things at the center
2) Make it take a long time for people to actually get there
3) By the time people discover that there's nothing there, they're long past the time that they can claim a refund
The very nature of the game works against players in this regard. A player's first thought, upon discovering that they're not finding anything like in the trailers is, "Well, there's 18 quadrillion planets... the stuff in the trailers must exist somewhere, the game can't be just the derpy stuff I've been encountering so far." By the time one has explored a statistically significant number of planets to come to the realization that, no, they've basically seen the whole game, that it really is that shallow... they're long past the time in which they can claim a refund. The game is also packed with "trophies" for doing trivial actions - which is also something companies take into account when deciding whether to give refunds ("Sorry, you've already done X % of the trophies....")
It's amazing how many people you find (or at least used to find ;) ) on the reddit sub for the game who seem to basically be trying to find a way to make themselves enjoy the game while they searched for things that they had been led to believe existed. They usually transitioned from this phase to very angry as they learned the extent of the fakery. Even the named stars you see in the loading screen aren't actually places people have named, they're just a hard-coded list.
Don't get me wrong, there are some people who actually enjoy it. But they're an extremely small number; the game is approaching half a percent of its initial player base. For a while most seemed to be using it as a screenshot-generating walking simulator. Now a lot of them seem to be spending their time carving rocks into very poor approximations of statues via the crude mining system.
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.