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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.... "
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.... "
Internet threats are not credible.
And yet so long as we effectively do nothing about them, they will continue. Explicit threats of physical harm should be at least ticketed.
Just because they lied and stole at such a massive scale does not give anyone the right to make death threats. They should be threating them with legal action not violence. I canâ(TM)t believe however, that this author thinks that just because people used the crap they purchased that things are ok. The game still isnâ(TM)t at the point where they promised. Thatâ(TM)s the developers fault. These people used Amazon, Walmart and Target as a kickstarter platform. Talk about death threats, but donâ(TM)t paint them as innocent of any crime.
I bought digitally and Sony wouldn't allow me to return the game based on false advertising. A chargeback would've gotten my account suspended. I just pirate everything now.
People who murder do not usually announce it.
Threats are a form of venting. See them as an early warning system to maybe be less of a dick.
Plug that hole, and the pressure will build up. Some people will end up murdering, who otherwise wouldn't.
In the case of it being a problem on the threatener's side, he would have to find what originally caused this trigger, and re-train those mental connections to be more separated from that past.
But in this case, it looks more like said butterflies were the straw that broke the camel's back, after years of the developers being complete dicks in very thin innocent clothing that only the most hopeless blackeyers would still not see through.
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.
In the long history of stuff like this there's usually 4 groups of people. The ones pissed off and who want to bitch. The ones that rally around the person(s) being attacked, in this case it was fans rallying around Deroir(fans really didn't like price or her hostile attitude towards fans - she burnt bridges there). For those that don't know he's a huge name in the GW community. So much so that he has an NPC named after him, people look to him for early lore/content changes, and so on. He also gets intrack development info from the developers above her for public reception. Then there's the people who jump in because of whatever social justice reason to support the "poor weak female who can't take being called out." The last group are the 3rd party trolls, who don't care and are out to fan the flames and fuck with everyone. And those are your "for the luzl shit stains."
Remember the studies over the last 4 years? Both men and women receive harassment, death threats, and abusive sexual tweets equally. Men are more likely to get violent tweets. Women are more likely to get tweets based around some sexual identifier. And women are the most likely to be the ones engaging in that sexual based harassment. The only area where women more likely to see more abuse is stalking, and the studies seem to agree that again women are the most vicious ones when stalking another.
The old parable "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" isn't just a tale. It's something that civilizations risen and fallen have seen in action. A women is more likely to use the knives in the back(or metaphorically) texts/reputation stabbing in the back. Work in ANY female dominated environment and you see this very often. A man is more likely to confront the accuser, and get into a physical fight over it, they're unable to talk it out.
Om, nomnomnom...
You're looking at it from a different angle than most gamers. You enjoy it as a developer achievement, something few other people really care about. Let me explain.
I develop hardware on the side. It's a bit of a pet project of mine and from time to time I watch what others develop. And someone came up with a really nifty design for a tiny web server in hardware. It was a beauty. Great craftsmanship, well designed, tweaked and perfected, hardware and firmware extremely optimized, hand crafted assembler code to get it to speed on what should have been a too weak IC to run it.
I showed it to a friend and his only comment was "Could be done on a RasPi, and cheaper". I tried to explain the amazing work behind it, he didn't care. He cared about the result. Nothing else.
Same here. Yes, it may be a great development achievement. But people playing it don't care. They want a game. As far as they're concerned, it could be oompa-loompas drawing 50 pictures per second.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.