
No Man’s Sky developer Sean Murray: ‘It was as bad as things can get’ - noir-york
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jul/20/no-mans-sky-next-hello-games-sean-murray-harassment-interview
======
nolok
It's not just a matter of the game not living up to marketing, or expectations
being set too high. On release week, after the game went gold, the guy (and
it's not a pr guy or whatever, he is part of the actual dev team, and creative
lead) was still doing live interview lying about major features such as
multiplayer or fleet battles. The first "release" trailer on the steam store
page was showing lots of things that weren't in the game, too.

See bribroder link to the reddit page for an idea of how far what they claimed
they sold was to what they were actually selling, and it will help you see
that as a cautious gamer, if you actually went out of your way to specifically
check for features shown on official release video and/or answered as yes/no
question by the game's lead, you would still be fooled. The reddit comment
matches direct interview answers with major missing features.

When you see two factions doing some major warring in space, and the guy
present it as actual gameplay that's in the game's build and says "Like here,
we're at the battle between two warring factions. I could join in, I could
take sides." and then there is no fleet battles anywhere in the game, I have a
hard time blaming the players for their expectations.

I strongly disagree with the crazyness displayed by a lot of people, and those
that go as far as death threat should be refered to the police. But this is
not a case of "rabbid fan attack dev who couldn't reach what marketing
promised", he put his hand in the fire to grab dollars, he got the money and
he also got burnt.

It was so bad, for a while valve made a exception to its refund policy
specifically for no man's sky, so that players could refund it even after
dozens of hours, because _the dev was hiding behind the "you have not played
enough, you will unlock it later in the game" trick_.

~~~
blechinger
I fought for a refund from Valve for about a week. Couldn't get one. I'm still
a bit salty about it.

I forget how many tens of hours I'd spent expecting to arrive at anything
resembling what was alluded to in the trailers or demos. It was probably 20+
hours until I realized that the problem wasn't related to progression-locked
content. I'd been swindled. No. More than that. I'd been robbed.

I was mad. Sure. But I was more hurt and disappointed than anything. I can no
longer trust Hello Games or Valve. Hello lied to consumers and Valve, from my
perspective, backed them up while allowing a select few to actually recieve
refunds for the sake of PR.

I understand the desire to protect Developers from unrealistic backlash.
You've got to draw a line somewhere which, after crossing, makes one
ineligible for the normal refund process. I do think the placement of that
line should vary by game (or at least genre) instead of the two hour hard
cutoff Valve uses.

For a game like No Man's Sky? At the two hour mark I was still taking in some
of the visuals and geeking out about what I _thought_ was coming. I definitely
hadn't gotten into any of the completely broken mechanics, lack of depth of
characters/worlds, or any other out of a plethora of disappointments and
outright lies Hello had baked into the game and its marketing.

So now, for most things, I refuse to pre-order. I might miss a few neat things
that I would have gotten otherwise, however; I won't get robbed again.

~~~
kjeetgill
Look, we're all unhappy about how this whole fiasco went down but dude, "I'd
been swindled. No. More than that. I'd been robbed." ? That's jumping the
shark a little bit.

You'd been swindled, sure. Plain and simple. Not robbed.

Letting anger and frustration escalate beyond the scope of an injustice isn't
doing anyone any good. I agree though, a more judicial approach to refunds is
probably warranted for a game that SO under delivered on the hype. This isn't
in the same ballpark of a let down as Spore.

------
bribroder
For those who missed it, the Reddit thread detailing the "expectations gap" on
launch:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no_mans_sky_we_were_sold_on_a_big_list/)

> "[But] if we hadn’t released No Man’s Sky when we had, and I was sat down
> talking to you now after we delayed it for two years, we would not have a
> game as good as it is right now"

It seems like Murray's argument is that misleading customers before the
initial release is justified because the sales money allowed them to finish
the game after launch. It's commendable that they didn't abandon the game
afterward, but that doesn't really excuse/correct/justify the deception--which
continued even post-launch. It's really unfortunate that Murray / HG get the
"underdog" narrative when what they really did was a bait and switch.

~~~
nolok
I have no source on this, but I would not be surprised one bit to learn it's
Sony that pushed them hard to support the game properly. They picked the game
when it was still indie, gave them lots of money to finish it and make it
playstation exclusive, paid for a lot of marketing, and then had a major push
for refund on the psn (which they "fought" against, because the psn is not
very refund friendly).

Given that 90% of the issue is not "it didn't live up to what we expected" but
"why is that guy lying about features that are in on release week", they
probably didn't want to let hello games off the hook and screw players
completly.

------
gottam
They knew what they were doing. They most certainly reached a point where they
realized they wouldn't deliver on the hype and speculation they were
generating, so they had the option to either tell people before launch it to
dial back expectations, or to double down to sell more and assume people will
get over it. They even went as far as not send out review copies before launch
so their fans had no warning to cancel their preorders.

This is not the first or will it be the last game to fail to deliver on
promises, but the game was practically designed to sell around broken
promises. The backlash was understandable, and simply more than they expected.
My surprise is that the article doesn't read of regret for making poor
decisions but more of victimhood like they didn't deserve the backlash.

The biggest thing they didn't consider about is the fact that there's a large
subset of gamers that have tons of time but not a lot of money, so the money
is incredibly important to them and when they're duped into buying something
like that which drastically didn't deliver, they have a lot of time to spend
to make other peoples lives miserable. Just imagine how angry these people
got.

------
krylon
So, this is totally OT, I just realized that death threats are the human
equivalent to DDOS attacks.

To the attacker, it is cheap, writing a letter/email/whatever that threatens
someone's life is no more difficult or expensive than a Thank You-note.

To the recipient, however, the situation is inverse: When your life is at
stake, you cannot afford to _not_ take them seriously, because you do not know
how serious the sender is about it.

That is a really shitty thing to do to someone.

------
makecheck
It’s kind of amazing how much money and faith people dump into games for
“nothing”. Crowd-funding and pre-orders are both money for “nothing” (no idea
if you’ll even get what you expected). Gems and other game items are “nothing”
(they’re not real things, the day the game server dies they go away). The
overwhelming majority of previews are _cinematics_ that show an idealized
story with NO gameplay, and again people invest based on this “nothing”.

Yet heaven forbid Netflix raise its prices by a dollar, or a restaurant, etc.
There are so many miniscule investments that people refuse to make. Game
company promising the world though? Wallets open!

~~~
LoSboccacc
It was weird to watch the NMS train wreck happen in such fashion.

Critical people were actively warning people this would happen, and yet
everyone went literally nuts for a scripted cinematic.

The whole thing smelled from the beginning, because there's people showing
demos, there's people showing cinematic, but Murray showed a cinematic with a
controller on hand pretending it was a demo. That's, like, as red as a flag
could get.

I'm glad the studio survived the whole con job, because the 500000 or so
people getting sold on a dream actually made possible for them to survive to
the NEXT patch, which is making me even consider the possibility of a purchase
if the reviews are good and the netcode/servers are proven able to handle the
load.

But a word of warning, this is just them doing marketing before a major patch,
so I'd be wary of the article content given the suspicious timing.

That said, I wish people could live up to their mistakes instead of throwing
death threats and harassing other people. For whatever Murray did, that kind
of behavior is _never_ warranted.

------
y4mi
While death threats are obviously an overreaction and should never be done, he
clearly doesn't realize what he's done either...

> _We definitely messed up a whole bunch of communication_

You lied at pretty much every interview to increase your revenue at launch.

I know a lot of people's advice is to fake it till you make it, but doing that
in the middle of the spotlight is obviously just begging to get your day
ruined.

~~~
nolok
Let's not forget how after launch he acted like you needed to play longer to
get to those features, pushing players past their playtime refund limits on
stores. For a while Valve made an exception specifically for this game, so
that you could get refund no matter how long you played. That's how much "evil
and intended" his trickery had been.

------
jefe_
When discussing system features/status with stakeholders, I've found it can be
dangerously easy to shift from concrete certainties to more of a
brainstorming, thinking-out-loud type dialogue. The problem is that
stakeholders often can't tell the difference between the two and while you're
internalizing and assessing the practicality of their request, they're hearing
confirmation of the feature's necessity and practicality. Once they have the
impression a feature will be there, it is tricky to walk that back. Once I
realized this, a simple language shift helped increase clarity:

old: "Idea" -> "hmm, yeah we could...{thinking out loud}"

new: "Idea" -> "interesting, let me look into that, check with some people,
and get back to you" or "interesting, there are a lot of pieces to that, how
would you prioritize this against {comparable item}?"

That said, it sounds like No Man's Sky team was performing unprompted
brainstorming sessions during public interviews, which is really unwise and
essentially inviting people to be disappointed...

~~~
clhodapp
It would be nice and pleasant if that were true but if you go back and watch
Sean Murray's interviews it is clear that it wasn't brainstorming. He really
did say that the game had things in it that did not have at launch.

------
zamalek
> Tagline: [Murray and] Hello Games coded a near-infinite universe and
> survived a harassment ordeal

Murray did survive a harassment ordeal and was a victim. Hello Games was held
accountable and was _not_ a victim - gamers who were lied to were victims.

This whole fiasco was at the pinnacle of the industry lying to consumers.
Hello Games concentrated this practice and exploited it to deceive gamers into
pre-ordering. The resulting fallout corrected this and it is absolutely
justified that the worst offender bore the brunt of the consequences.

The game is still full AAA price but plays like an indie title. Their
promotional content is not in-game and is deceptive. Hello Games hasn't
learned anything at all and really doesn't deserve a pity piece such as this
one.

~~~
watwut
"was held accountable" here is euphemism for harassment, which is not fine nor
"holding accountable" and make them victim.

Demanding money back, writing articles about game being bad, suing them,
reporting them to authorities (lying in ads can lead to fines) are holding
accountable steps.

Harassment is not "consequences", it is just another attempt to euphemism it
away. A lot of harassment is not from paying people or wronged customers
anyway, it is from people who like to do harassment and do it for fun. This
excuse making is quite typical for gaming culture, but just leads to more
harassment by next confident emotionally unstable assholes.

~~~
oxide
Demanding money back is not harrassment, especially after being conned.

~~~
watwut
That is what I meant. It is true holding accountable. It is very legitimate
action. So is reporting false advertisement etc. Or lobbying for bigger window
when you can return game or whatever regulations would make it easier to get
money back next time.

------
root_axis
I don't feel bad for the guy. Obviously death threats are unacceptable and the
perpetrators deserve severe legal consequences, but the bottom line is that
Sean Murray received a lot of money and publicity based on very public and
explicit lies regarding the tech of his game. As an actual engineer, I think
he is especially culpable because he knew he was spinning falsehoods for hype
and pre-orders. I also have disdain for the guy on a professional level
because it's really easy to bootstrap a product if you convincingly lie about
all the tech but take everyone's money anyway then "ask forgiveness" after the
fact. It's disgusting.

Edit for the downvoters: Where am I wrong? Do you disagree that he explicitly
lied or do you disagree that people who issue online death threats deserve
severe legal consequences?

~~~
lfam
The problem is your second sentence which is structured like this:

"Obviously death threats are unacceptable [...] but [...]".

~~~
CryoLogic
I don't see what's wrong with that. The idea he is trying to get across is
that death threats are not appropriate, but the CEO Sean Murray is indeed a
lier and betrayed a large audience who believed in him and gave him a huge sum
of pre-orders. Unhappiness is to be expected from a company who's CEO is a
pathological lier.

Watch his interviews - he talks about it being an MMO style game in some of
them, where you can meet your friends and explore side by side. Literally
claims the game is multiplayer and it is labeled as co-op before launch.
Players buy the game and realize there is literally no co-op whatsoever on
launch day.

Sean Murray was involved in the engineering efforts, and knew he was outright
lying to the media. It wasn't like he was a detached CEO of a large company
not engaged in engineering so he didn't really know what was going on. No, he
knew all the features he claimed where not real. He flat out took advantage of
all of his customers.

~~~
Jach
> death threats are not appropriate

GP's word was "unacceptable", not "not appropriate", but I think yours is
probably the better position for such a vaguely defined term as "death
threat".

On the more meta level as one commenter points out how sometimes "death
threats" can be used as a DDOS attack on a person, they can also sometimes be
used to get undeserved sympathies. Making up alleged offenses is not new and
many people seem to just take this guy (who we know is a liar) at his word
that these vague terrible things happened that he doesn't want to go into more
details about. (I should clarify that I don't really doubt that he received
hate mail and possibly other communications that could be classified "death
threat" by some people, this being the internet, and the people involved being
gamers. But hate mail is merely inappropriate, generally speaking; it's rude.
A specific piece of hate mail could be unacceptable, it depends.)

~~~
jamesgeck0
"Death threat" is a specific term; it has a legal definition in most states.
There are no appropriate or acceptable death threats. It doesn't matter if you
think they're not consequential; they had the desired effect on the person
receiving the threat.

This whole argument is strongly reminiscent of attempts to discredit female
game developers who were being harassed during GamerGate.

------
bufferoverflow
> _“The internet is really good at knowing when somebody has made a mistake,”_

Hmmm, no, it wasn't a mistake, you lied. Many times.

He definitely doesn't deserve death threats, but I have no sympathy for him
otherwise. Instead of admitting the promised game features will not happen, he
chose to lie.

------
rm_-rf_slash
I think there is something very sad about people conducting harassment and
sending threats to creators of....entertainment.

There is so much wrong with this cruel and unfair world, I understand how some
people might want to cope through escapism. But when people get so belligerent
about the creators and maintainers of fantasies, one has to wonder how much
escapism has replaced the reality for these people.

I mean, who cares that Disney scrapped the Star Wars Expanded Universe in
favor of their (imho) mediocre film sequels? The fans didn’t buy the Star Wars
franchise - Disney did.

Same goes for NMS. It looked interesting until it came out and the reviews
amounted to a collective shrug. So I passed.

The tragic irony to me is that as the relationship between the creators of
entertainment and their fans becomes more toxic, the acts of the fans (or
perhaps more accurately, jerks) serve to make these fantasy worlds as shitty
as the real one.

~~~
wtetzner
Funnily enough, I hadn't payed any attention to the marketing or hype of the
game before it came out. I just got a used copy at GameStop, and because I had
no expectations, I found it to be pretty fun. If they had just marketed it as
it really was, the reviews probably would have been higher.

~~~
Crespyl
My experience was similar, in that I mostly avoided the promotional content
after I'd seen enough to sell me on the concept.

I saw the concept of "open world, seamless procedural planets, wander around
and gawk at the pretty scenery", and I was pretty much sold. Any promises past
that were either obviously over-hyped, promo bs that could not possibly be
delivered in time, or ads/interviews/videos that I never saw.

I wanted a modern take on Noctis, saw that NMS was offering something pretty
darn close to that, and was happy with what I got.

This is not to detract from the misleading promotion, but I do think the whole
thing would have been so much better received if NMS was published as the
beta/early access procedural survival/exploration game that it so clearly
actually was on release, instead of the AAA Sony/PS4 flagship must-buy that it
was marketed as.

~~~
EpicEng
>This is not to detract from the misleading promotion

But it wasn't just 'misleading'; it was outright fraud. It wasn't "looks how
awesome this feature is!" and then "oh, well it's not quite as awesome as they
said". It was "oh, that feature isn't even in the game."

------
nortiero
Sorry, I don't buy it. Man kept overpromising (somebody would say "lying")
even after release. Now he's on a publicity stunt for the latest and greatest
product, addon, whatever, and cheaply plays the always popular victim card.
Nobody says that maybe some angry commenters where "overpromising" too, with
their enormous and unpractical threats. The journalist is of course thrilled
to expose weirdos -- the correct type of weirdos, so to speak -- to his small
court of readers, for outrage and clicks. A deal is made to reciprocal
benefit.

------
013a
If anyone wants a summary of the situation at launch, this YouTube video ranks
among the "all time classic" videos ever made; its an absolutely depressing,
satirical, hilarious view into the situation [1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ)

~~~
user982
I hoped that link would be this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik)

~~~
Randin
That's pretty damning.

------
dorkwood
I was extremely skeptical from the start because I saw the same thing play out
10 years ago when Maxis released Spore. Don’t buy into the hype and you can’t
be disappointed.

------
ben509
> I remember thinking to myself: ‘Maybe when you’re sending a death threat
> about butterflies in a game, you might be the bad guy.’”

You might also _really_ like butterflies.

------
fred_is_fred
I've often wondered why people don't publish names for people who send death
threats. Would that help stop it? Is there a reason law enforcement doesn't
want them to do so?

~~~
394549
> I've often wondered why people don't publish names for people who send death
> threats.

My guess is the threats are usually made anonymously-enough that that would be
difficult to truly expose those who made them, and exposing them would also
expose how pretty much all of them lack any credibility.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
A death threat doesn't lack credibility because it's anonymous. It doesn't
necessarily lack credibility even because it reads like an obvious dimwitted
trolling attempt. Sure, the vast majority of such threats aren't serious --
but it only takes one that turns out to be real.

