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.

Comments

don't get your hope up

[aepervius]

the producer just need to take down the screenshot/video on steam and replace it with a current one and they are fine.

Re:don't get your hope up

[OverlordQ]

Should force Steam to issue refunds for anybody that wants one who bought before that point though.

Re:don't get your hope up

[JustNiz]

No, I already bought it on the basis of those screenshots.

Re:don't get your hope up

[subanark]

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.

Re:don't get your hope up

[war4peace]

Sorry but no. There's a shitload of videos and text which show without a shadow of doubt that promises were made and left unfulfilled. people bought the game based on the information at hand which was more than misleading. Misleading is when you hint something, which proves to be less that was was alluded to. Like "Big Trunk", which is misleading because it has no frame of reference (and even so, it's stretching things), But Sean Murray specifically said there will be some sort of multiplayer, that ships will handle differently based on their looks, that NPC factions are warring in space, that you can land on asteroids, that you can grief other players ("A little bit, yeah"), and so on. Those were ALL captured on video and available on Youtube and other channels.

It was a big fat web of lies and deception and it was only a matter of time until shit hit the fan.

Re:don't get your hope up

[wardrich86]

"Maybe if I just put in another 100 or so hours I'll be able to find those sweet areas that they used to make the promo material with!" -No person ever

Re:don't get your hope up

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

Re:don't get your hope up

[Dread_ed]

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.

Re:don't get your hope up

[Zocalo]

Actually, OP is probably right not to get your hopes up. The ASA is pretty toothless in practice; their track record is usually "Don't use that advert again!" and the occassional slap on the wrist fine and/or requirement to print a retraction in the media. I don't recall a single instance where they've actually required compensation, let alone refunds, be paid to someone who fell for the misleading advertising before it got pulled.

Re:don't get your hope up

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my dear god, not this all over again? We discussed this here already, and it's been discussed why that's wrong. Please go back to the prior discussion and read about it.

Really? You're not going to bother explaining that?

Well, in any case, for people who don't want to go hunting for earlier, unmentioned discussions, here's the gist of it:

It's not abnormal for games to put content behind gates. You don't get all the weapons on the first level of Doom, you have to go through earlier levels to get to later levels, you unlock powers as you play through, that general idea. No Man's Sky initially appears to be following this pattern: your first planet has plenty of resources for the survival aspect, but you need to leave and go out into space and visit other planets to unlock new tech and get new ships. There are two content paths (follow the path of Atlas or reach the center of the galaxy) that you can take to do this. Each path supposedly takes 40-60 hours of gameplay to complete.

Problem: What I just said about needing to leave and go out into space? Turns out, you don't. You can grind up just about everything on your first planet. (There's an exception - alien languages - but it's completely meaningless. Each planet is tied to one of three alien races, so you'd need to grind on one of each to max literally everything.)

Now you'd assume - and a lot of initial looks did - that the first planet intentionally had bountiful resources to ensure you didn't get screwed when you start the game. The logical assumption is that as the game progresses and you travel towards one of the two goals, the planets become more hostile and more resources become available to offer new tech and new features.

Nope. They don't.

About the only way to verify that, in fact, the content promised really is missing is to put a good 40-60 hours of gameplay in. I made it about 10 hours (although Steam says I played for 20, probably due to tech issues and AFKing) before giving up on the planets ever being any different from one another.

No Man's Sky is one of those games designed to provide just enough gameplay experience to get you past the refund cutoff before revealing that's all there is.

Re:don't get your hope up

[Opportunist]

Honest question: What else should I base my decision to buy a game on if not screenshots and gameplay previews?

Re:don't get your hope up

[war4peace]

It was false advertisement.
Example: Sean Murray showcased some planets during live gameplay, said to be "random planets from the game" and after analyzing the game files, people have discovered those planets as statically scripted ones, left in the game files.

Re:don't get your hope up

[war4peace]

The Steam Page STILL shows screenshots of stuff not in the game. That monolith you see on the Steam Page screenshots? Not in the game. The big space battle? Not in the game. The nice colors? Not in the game. The huge animal in the screenshot? Yes, you guessed it... not in the game.
Oh and all screenshots there are from a scripted static planet which people have found in the game files. There are three such planets in there.

Re:don't get your hope up

[CronoCloud]

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

Re:don't get your hope up

[Rei]

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.

Long overdue

[MitchDev]

Long overdue to start making these game companies follow the same truth in advertising laws other companies have to obey...

Re:Long overdue

[phorm]

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.

Re:Long overdue

[billcopc]

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.

Re:What?

[JustNiz]

> 2) Grammer??

I think you mean Grammar. Pot meet kettle.

Re:Consoles, anyone?

[GrumpySteen]

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.

LOL, very long... like since the first video game.

[DarthVain]

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...

Re:Not impressed

[elrous0]

A friend described it as "Like Elite Dangerous, if you stripped everything interesting out of it and designed it for kindergartners."

Re:Long overdue (say what?)

[starX]

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.

... pretty much got what I expected ...

[ninjagin]

I've got about 140 hours in on PC, and I may be at the crest of what I can do. I've got my suit and tool and ship maxed out for inventory, with suit and ship maxed out with upgrades. Some 20,000,000 units in the bank. Learned 2 of the 3 alien languages (halfway through the last one, by now). I'm pretty much down to achievements at this point, and jumping from system to system. Visually, it's got a lot of appeal. It's pretty soothing to play -- a bit like "Endless Ocean". I didn't really expect to get great spaceflight mechanics or anything like that. I pretty much grind out on burglarizing Operations Centers and Manufacturing Facilities, looking for new tech blueprints to make a handful of technologies and materials I don't already have ... and learn that last language. It's beginning to get a little dull.

So what's it missing?

• Well, the NPC aliens are pretty much finger-puppets that iterate through a set of 4-5 interaction templates and then repeat them. They don't walk around anywhere or appear outside of the stock set of buildings.
• The economy is pretty simple and even though it is nominally "galactic", you can't find or buy everything at trade terminals. There is seemingly no influence of supply or demand in it.
• The animal life is kinda cool to watch and interact with. There ware some truly bizarre creatures out there. But, your only interaction paths seem to be feed and or shoot 'em. It gets tiresome just running around scanning them to 'collect them all'. I've only seen worlds with about a dozen or so animals, so it's not terribly rich.
• The flora is pretty much static, but there are some grassy worlds where there's a lot of movement in the terrain, but it's simplified down to just the grass that moves, and everything moves together at the same time in a somewhat unsettling rocking oscillation that I can't handle for more than 5 minutes at a time. There are other games like Crysis where the wind will move leaves in the trees, or your shots will blow away branches on the trees, but we have no detail like that.
• There's a flimsy-yet-huge quest string (Atlas) that is casually interesting, but it seems to crop up randomly to remind you that it's there. There's no notion of one thing or achievement or activity that leads you to seek out the next. There are no real side paths and the NPCs don't seem to be involved in any quest activity. It'd do well to have a bunch of quest strings, like a hundred per planet and a hundred per system (maybe rated by difficulty?) that you could sink into.
• Each planet is a starter-world. That is, if you started the game afresh, everything you need to max everything out is pretty much right there on that first planet. Yeah, there are variations that force you to leave for other worlds (like toxic atmospheres and/or aggressive sentinels) to advance completely or get new materials, but once you have everything maxed out, 80 percent of all buildings and their loot or capabilities become so useless that they can be ignored. I don't even pick up random loot anymore to sell, because I don't have any way to spend the money and no use for the random crap, regardless. When you have all the upgrades, there's nothing left to build.
• It just seems to lack a lot of rich creative content. I'd like to see more ship types, to have the ability to customize the appearance of the ships, too. I'd like to see and maybe build unique buildings. It would be great if I could build my own settlement or compound and be able to advertise it for visitors. Crafting for different types of suit skins and color schemes or ship types would be welcome .. anything you could sell as a finished thing. There just need to be more aliens, everywhere... outside walking around, harvesting resources, sleeping under trees, hunting creatures, visiting monoliths and ruins, shopping at trading posts, drinking in pubs, playing holographic monopoly or something. I've never run into a settlement that has more than three aliens and each on