Hello Games Received Death Threats Over 'No Man's Sky' (theguardian.com)

The Guardian revisits the disastrous 2016 launch of the massive open-universe videogame No Man's Sky, in a new interview with company director Sean Murray: "I've never liked talking to the press. I didn't enjoy it when I had to do it, and when I did it, I was naive and overly excited about my game. There are a lot of things around launch that I regret, or that I would do differently." He is reluctant to relive the particulars of what happened in the weeks and months following No Man's Sky's release in August 2016 ("I find it really personal, and I don't have any advice for dealing with it," he says), but it involved death threats, bomb threats sent to the studio and harassment of people who worked at Hello Games on a frightening scale. They were in regular contact with Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan police... "I remember getting a death threat about the fact that there were butterflies in our original trailer, and you could see them as you walked past them, but there weren't any butterflies in the launch game. I remember thinking to myself: 'Maybe when you're sending a death threat about butterflies in a game, you might be the bad guy....'"

Despite the controversy, No Man's Sky sold extremely well, and plenty of its players have stuck by it. A year after release, when Hello Games released the Atlas Rises update, about a million people showed up to play, and the average playtime was 45 hours.... It is still recognisable as the lonely, abstractly beautiful space-exploration game I played in 2016, but three big updates have added a lot more. It is now definitely a better game, with much more to do and a clearer structure... Now you can also construct bases, drive around in vehicles and -- as of next week -- invite other players to explore with you, in groups of four. You can crew a freighter together, or colonise a planet with ever-expanding constructions.
"You are still a tiny speck in an infinite universe," writes the Guardian. "it's just that now, you have some company." Murray describes it as a "Star Trek away team vibe."

In another interview, Murray concedes that during the five years they'd spent in development, "We talked about the game way earlier than we should have talked about the game.... "

Comments

Re:Bombs over butterflies?

[Dutch Gun]

I'll say the same thing about this issue as I did about the recent ArenaNet controversy: there are two part to the No Man's Sky issue.

The first part: No matter how you try to spin things, Murray out and out lied about what features would be in the game, and showed mocked-up videos that purported to show features of the game that, even today, fall, far far short of the promises. And there was no retraction about those missing features until people purchased the game and found they weren't there.

The second part is some in the gaming public's stupid over-reaction to things like this. Just like with Jessica price, whatever the reason for the outrage, there's no excuse for the level of vitriol heaped on these people in the form of harassment and death threats. Complaining in a public forum is one thing, especially since it involved a non-trivial amount of a purchase price, but death threats? So, yes, this sort of harassment happens to men as well as women. Let's not forget that in future conversations.

What really kills me is that No Man's Sky was not a terrible game. Not a great one, but it showed a lot of promise. But it was ridiculously over-hyped, over-priced, and over-promised. Nothing is going to live up to that.

I'm an independent game developer myself, working for an eventual release of my own game, so I'm sort of sympathetic in some ways, but perhaps even less so in others. What Murray did was breach trust with the public. Once lost, it's going to be extremely difficult to win that trust back. I'd like to think I wouldn't need that lesson taught to me at this point in my life, but I thank Murray for emphatically re-inforcing those principles.