
ASA Investigating No Man’s Sky’s Steam Advertising - MattBearman
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/09/28/asa-investigating-no-mans-skys-steam-advertising/
======
radiorental
An interesting side note is that the most popular recent thread on
/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/ has been about people who have stopped playing but check
in daily for news.

A common theme in that sub is that the news about Hello Games is far more
entertaining than the game itself.

Fundamentally, the game failed to deliver any emergent gameplay between the
various procedural components. An infinite universe that's completely
lifeless, waiting for for you to interact with it.

They've released 9 updates so far, mostly bug fixing, there's talk of new
features in the future but I have a hard time seeing how they truly fix the
game.

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therealasdf
I don't understand why it's only No Man's Sky that's being investigated. What
about other known games that came out below expectations and with misleading
advertisements? Watch dogs being a prime example.

~~~
throwawayReply
ASA are reactive not proactive, it takes complaints for an investigation to be
triggered.

Their standard punishment is "don't show the advert again in this form", this
isn't a scary prospect for Hello Games.

~~~
radiorental
> this isn't a scary prospect for Hello Games.

You're right, they have far bigger problems, I wonder if HG has a future given
how tarnished their name is?

I feel sorry for Sean Murray, in hindsight he seems like a Walter Mitty
character; big on dreams and when anything was suggested in an interview he
let his imagination answer.

~~~
retox
The new Peter Molyneux?

~~~
radiorental
I didn't follow that debacle too closely, from what I understand Spore was too
ambitious but at some level it delivered.

NMS on the other hand is just a badly designed game. Sure, there was hype and
over commitment. However, the core game loop is so shallow it's borderline
fraudulent.

~~~
winthrowe
You're thinking of Will Wright; Peter Molyneux's classic fame was Populous and
Black and White, and recent controversy Godus.

~~~
retox
Fable is the one that sticks out most in my mind. He's a very talented
director and developer but I think by his own admission he hypes his own work
beyond what is reasonable. I'm sure he was never doing so to deceive, but you
can't talk about amazing features and then completely fail to deliver and not
expect blowback.

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shostack
That's great to see happening, but any word on the situation with Steam
refunds since you pretty much had to play more than an hour or whatever their
refund cutoff is to determine that the game oversold itself?

~~~
Mithaldu
The automated and entirely machine-driven refunds will reject you for too much
playtime, but after that rejection you go further and get it to a human and
they'll refund you.

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andybak
It's worth noting that Elite: Dangerous is constantly improving and is
definitely worth another look if you found the gameplay a bit thin when it was
released. Planetary landing, multi-crew ships, fighter launch from larger
ships have all been introduced.

Still no landing on earth-like planets thought :-(

~~~
Paul_S
When did multicrew happen? The game is on life support as the company is
working on other projects. They keep missing all the deadlines.

~~~
zamalek
> company is working on other projects.

This is how game development works.

You only need the senior engine engineers when you are tackling hard problems
(e.g. they would have been roped in for planetary landing). You only need
artists when art is being added to the game. Multicrew? Probably needs a
senior network coder or two. You can't pay people to sit around and do
nothing, and you can't sack people with in-depth knowledge about your IP - so
you put them on another project. It's almost like consulting, but for a single
entity who so happens to be yourself.

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qplex
Bleh. It is the same brouhaha that surrounds every overhyped game. This has
been going on for ages.

I guess the new twist is that gamers pay up front, sometimes years ahead, and
that only adds to the disappointment when the game actually comes out and is
not the best thing since sliced bread.

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FussyZeus
> “My hope,” he tells us, “is this could give Valve a reminder/prod that they
> themselves have a responsibility, they can’t just blame individual
> publishers, and this might help them keep future games being listed, more
> honest.”

Why is it Valve's responsibility? And how did Valve act inappropriately at
all? AFAIK they were the first publisher/store to offer refunds for NMS after
the story broke that it was largely unfinished, and aside from some wasted
time on the part of the players everyone walked away relatively unscathed.

The alternative would be that Valve would have to have a review process for
every game that passes through Steam, which means they would have to charge a
lot more for the Steam Greenlight service. The vast, vast majority of indie
developers do not do this sort of thing, and benefit greatly from the audience
and ease of distribution that Steam provides. I just don't see what offloading
that responsibility to Valve would accomplish, aside from setting Valve up to
be a deep-pocketed lawsuit target.

~~~
Mithaldu
> AFAIK they were the first to offer refunds

Not out of any manual action on their part. All refunds steam offered were
100% in line with their policies from before the game was released.

~~~
FussyZeus
Manual action isn't needed when the policies are already good.

------
youdontknowtho
Wow. I really wanted this game to be amazing. Hell, I've played it over 100
hours, but that's mainly because I waited so long for it to come out.

I have an 8x AMD with 32GB RAM and a Radeon 7970. Not a bad system. At 1080p
it drops frames all the time. It freaks out at weird moments in game play.
There is this weird tick where every alien that shows up at a space station
will be the same alien. As I play it I really think about how if they hadn't
hyped it, it would be fun...maybe not worth 60$...but it would be fun. I;m
old. I guess I was hoping it would turn into the greatest Trade Wars 2002
ever. It's really not even close. As you move around the galaxy you really
wonder sometimes...why the fsck am I doing this again? I've upgrade my person
and ship to the point that they are almost indestructible to anything that
I've met to this point. At first I did this alternate path through the game
where you "follow the atlas"...you go through multiple solar systems chasing
this thing and it gives you a shiny red orb every time that you catch up to
it. Ok. Then at the last one it says..."hey, I'm the last one. Do you want to
give me those stones and create a new star?"...Sure why not. You give it the
stones and then it says...in text..."somewhere...out there...a new star was
created. thanks for the stones dawg". That's it. I thought there would at
least be a pre-rendered star-being-created animation. Nope. AND you don't have
those shiny orbs anymore which were the most valuable things in the in-game
economy.

At this point, I keep thinking that HG will release a patch that makes it not
terrible. Seriously. I would settle for just bad at this point. I'm not like a
lot of the Reddit crowd that wants to see Sean Murray hanged. I just think
this was a huge wasted opportunity. If this had been a PC only game or an Xbox
indie release it would have been amazing. Having to go the big time console
release route made the hype really crazy. It showed, though, how intense the
followers of an immersive universe sized space game would be if you could
build something like a high quality 3D Trade Wars 2002.

But yeah...they should make it not suck at this point. I really try to not be
critical of other people's creative work, but seriously. Make it not suck.
(Some new music would be great too. I like it, but the sushi bar techno gets
old after a while.)

EDIT: I hadn't watched those trailers again since the game came out. OH MY
GOD. I forgot how amazing they were. There was more diversity in the first 3
minutes of that trailer than there was in 100 hours of gameplay. Jesus. Sean
said in an interview that they were doing all of this generation on the client
side and relying on the fact that planet creation was somehow idempotent for
everyone to have the same experience. What I don't get is why, in 2016, would
you even remotely try to do everything client side? As soon as someone jumps
into a solar system that would be a trigger for a distributed job on a cluster
to assist in generating the details. Those details would need to then be
cached somewhere, but you wouldn't need to generate them again. After that
some direction and story mechanics could steer people towards some pre-
engineered experiences that would bring them together and drive the plot.
Jesus Christ, this isn't rocket science anymore. There are text books with
this stuff in it. They said "no loading screens"...I WISH THERE WERE. The
stutter that the game has when transitioning between environments is worse
than a loading screen.

I would have bought a new computer to play the game in those trailers. Man.
What a waste.

~~~
ablation
You've ploughed over 100 hours into even though it "sucks" and you want it to
be patched so it's "not terrible" anymore?

Seems like a lot of time to dedicated to something that you don't really like.
Do you feel like you got value for money, given the amount of time you've
spent playing it?

~~~
crispyambulance
yep, 100 hours ?! ...and for perspective, it has been less than 2 months since
release date in early August. That is a HUGE investment of time. I like the
game (although I certainly haven't put 100 hours into it), it has some true
innovation but its a friggin' game. How much can one expect from a computer
game? You play it for a while until you get bored and then quit. 100+ hours of
gameplay for $60 seems like a smashing success to me. I mean, how much time
would a "great" game use up? Are we in South Park Territory (...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft))??

I get the feeling HG was forced to release it too early-- probably by pushy
"project management professionals." Someday we may hear the juicy details of
what happened.

~~~
qplex
That is still under 2 hours per day. Not that much in my books, especially if
you do not watch TV or play other games...

