> "[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.
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.
Of course, a good response to Murray's argument is that if they'd waited a bit longer and released the game with the promised features intact (or just released it as is, without lying) then the good PR would have gotten them a lot more sales and the same extra features they're adding now could have been added anyway. How many people didn't buy the game because they realised they were being lied to? How many of those who did buy No Man's Sky will ever buy another game from Murray and his studio?
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?
> 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.
They don't need to be credible to ruin someone's life. If you talk to people this has happened to, they can't sleep, they end up moving, they stop leaving the house, etc etc. The perpetrators should be prosecuted as if they are all credible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I strongly disagree with the crazyness displayed by a lot of people
But not strongly enough, apparently, to get that statement any higher than the fourth paragraph of your comment. Which tells me you're more interesting in flogging the bad game and its developers than you are in instances of actual, real-world harrassment.
This is the same thing that happened with gamergate too. "Harrassment!? Fine, whatever, there are bad apples. I'm not one of them, it's not relevant. Let's talk about how awful Those Women were instead."
I mean, look: it was a bad game. The developers oversold, underdelivered, and probably lied a bit too. The complaint has merit. But at some point the externalities of a situation mean we have to stop talking about meritorious complaints, because we're just egging on much worse behavior.
Then that phrase makes no sense to me. Wouldn't it be the same as saying something like "we can't critize Donald Trump for his criminal actions because doing that just encourages people sending him death threats".
I think that is exactly what he meant to answer yes, that criticizing the game or the dev's behaviors (with actual valid complaints) was wrong, because some people who did that also did bad things.
I take issue with your argument that we should bury meritorious complaints just because they happen to be associated with bad behavior. Taking that approach to the extreme, should we stop talking about politics completely? There has to be a better approach than sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that the audience is unable to hold two distinct arguments in their heads at a time.
I emphasize with your core argument that sometimes we need to discuss the bad behavior out front, but people have different priorities - it doesn't make sense to hold everyone else to your particular mix of priorities.
The world has plenty of injustice for all of us to decide which ones we want to talk about. Right now the Trump administration is separating children from their parents, genocide is being perpetrated in Syria, and 124 million people in 51 countries around the world are facing crisis level food insecurity.
People are literally being kidnapped or killed or starving and you're complaining about online harrassment.
Perspective is a great thing, but it applies to everyone, even you. I don't begrudge either of you your particular focuses or grievances, and you shouldn't begrudge anyone else's their own.
> [...] People are literally being kidnapped or killed or starving and you're complaining about online harrassment. [...]
In the context of this discussion, about an article about online harassment, this is a very disingenuous straw man. Yes, there are other problems in the world, but this isn't the forum to debate them.
It's not just about online harrassment, though. It's also about a fraudulent game developer. So when the OP was complaining about that fraud, they were completely on topic and justified.
I was responding to a person who was saying that because death threats are worse than fraud, you can't talk about the fraud. I was making the comparison to far greater injustices to turn the same argument on them.
I find it hard to believe that you truly misunderstood my rhetorical tool as a call to discuss those injustices here.
> But not strongly enough, apparently, to get that statement any higher than the fourth paragraph of your comment. Which tells me you're more interesting in flogging the bad game and its developers than you are in instances of actual, real-world harrassment.
You're making a big reach there. The parent comment is responding to the article, which is towing the developer line that the release wasn't that bad, they hit their expectations, it was just stuff like missing butterflies - none of which is true. The harassment issue is a problem, but I see nothing wrong with a comment correcting core problems with the article first.
But not bad enough to get that statement any higher than the fourth paragraph of your comment. Even Gamergate came in the 3rd paragraph. You're more interested in flogging a previous commenter than... well, you get the point.
The order of ideas does not necessarily represent their importance in an absolute frame of reference. When talking about lithium batteries you won't start with a disclaimer that you strongly condemn child labor in DRC cobalt mines.
Also, for my 4th paragraph, I'll just say that you're willing to grossly understate what the developers did which makes me think you are very biased about this, hence making a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to the least important part of a comment.
The fact that some people are nuts does not absolve Sean, and the fact that Sean perpetrated a fraud does not absolve the crazies making threats over a $60 game.
We can't control the crazies. They will always be out there and it makes no sense to focus only on them every time they pop out of the woodwork.
In the US around 1 in 1000 people will murder someone in their life. So if you scam a million people then on average you scam around 1000 murderers. Getting death threats when you make that many murderers angry should be expected and actually getting killed is not out of the question. This is not a problem with the gaming community, this is a problem with society in general.
Killing someone is of course illegal, but I wouldn't go around taunting murderers unnecessary anyway. They are provably irrational so them getting punished wont stop them while I would still be dead.
That's some unpleasant logic that is seemingly sound - if you lump all murderers together and assume that every one of them is just waiting for some random Joe to come along to be the target of their simmering bloodlust.
But the vast majority of murderers know their victims and have some kind of relationship with them - spouse, significant other (at least at some point), drug dealer, relative of a victim, whatever.
If a politician spouts outright lies (to the effect of "this next bill will do X, Y, and Z" a few days before the bill is signed, when it does none of those things, which is akin to what happened here), they justifiably will get a ton of complaints from people.
When you put yourself out there in a public space, and especially when you're charging people money, you risk major backlash if you're caught lying about significant things. Does that warrant death threats? Of course not. Does it warrant criticism, protests, demands for refunds, and accusations of fraud on social media? Definitely.
If the game dev considers public backlash harassment, he should enter a new line of work and/or not lie to paying customers. Except for cases where the harassment turns into threats, he has no right to complain. He's the only one who put himself in this mess.
> I mean, look: it was a bad game. The developers oversold, underdelivered, and probably lied a bit too. The complaint has merit. But at some point the externalities of a situation mean we have to stop talking about meritorious complaints, because we're just egging on much worse behavior.
OK. I will, for the purpose of conversation, cede your point that there is some point beyond which even just, deserved, valid, polite, and correct complaints should be ignored because of the side-effects. How do you propose we determine when this point has been reached?
I'm not sure what words you're trying to put into my mouth or why; but I feel like you're completely out of line.
I live in a country (France) where such harassement (especially death threat) can and will be acted on by the police if reported, and regularly are. I agree with that policy, and I agree with the recent move by our government to make it easier to report online harassement.
I absolutely disagree with your statement that if a part of a group is rotten, no matter how small or big, then all of the group's complaints should be ignored to avoid drawing attention to the bad members. This is stupid on a lot of level, easily abused (don't like that group ? just infiltrate them and make them part of something bad ! a great plan used by all of your favorite dictators), and frankly I can't believe anyone smart would argue for that.
By that same logic, we should not heed the concerns of those harassed online because some of them have done harassment themselves ! Great plan there.
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.
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.
I think Murray acted badly in his overpromising, but I would argue that the game seemed to have an exceptionally hyped fanbase. Jason Schreier of Kotaku received death threats simply for being the guy to report that the game would be late: https://kotaku.com/i-got-death-threats-for-reporting-on-a-vi...
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.
great comment. as an independent game developer i’ve noticed similar things about game players. they are more entitled than saas product users for some reason.
i think it’s because they go to games for fun. if there’s a bug in a game, it ruins their fun. a bug in facebook— who cares? you can just come back tomorrow. and a bug in a saas product, slack or gmail is a reason to go home from work early.
>great comment. as an independent game developer i’ve noticed similar things about game players. they are more entitled than saas product users for some reason.
How exactly do you reach the conclusion that gamers are entitled because they expected features explicitly said to be in the game by the lead designer and developer? Sure, gamers can be an ornery bunch, but in this instance Sean deserved everything he got short of the perpetual harassment and threats. He literally defrauded the people who bought his game, and that's not hyperbole.
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.
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.
>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."
You have made an awful lot of salty comments on this sub-thread and they beg the question: did you buy NMS on release and are miffed about your purchase? Or did you not buy the game and are simply outraged on behalf of others?
>did you buy NMS on release and are miffed about your purchase? Or did you not buy the game and are simply outraged on behalf of others?
That one. I was interested and followed development closely, but I waited and then passed.
What you call "salty" I call sharing my opinion on the topic of the article. Similarly, I suppose I could say you are an apologist, but I don't see how that gets us anywhere. I play video games and despise the way the industry is going. NMS was one of the worst offenders.
this is the funniest thing about the story of nms to me. the marketing department did their job too well. if i did nms marketing i would be really pissed that i completely knocked it out of the park and launched this indie title from a new studio to AAA levels of hype, only to be branded as misleading scum.
Some people are nuts, and threats are ridiculous, but you fail to mention the fact that Sean outright _lied_ about the game before and slightly after launch. This was not "poor communication", it was intentional deceipt.
I never said poor communication. My subject regarded the entitlement of expectations from consumers.
We’re not talking about salmonella lettuce or a blood test kit that doesn’t work or carcinogenic flame retardants here. This is a product of digital entertainment, with minuscule value to our overall society.
Nobody forced these people to pre-order the game or buy it on launch day. They went and bought it before the reviews came out. It is entirely on them as consumers for failing to execute due diligence.
So what if the creator lied through their teeth? Plenty of people enjoyed the game for what it was anyway. If an investor wants to sue for breach of contract, they can go for it. Otherwise, the consumers have no recourse. There is no fraud without a court judgement, just a bunch of pissed off consumers. It may suck but that’s the law. Change it if you don’t like it.
>We’re not talking about salmonella lettuce or a blood test kit that doesn’t work or carcinogenic flame retardants here. This is a product of digital entertainment, with minuscule value to our overall society.
What's your point? People shouldn't be pissed that he purposely lied about the game he was trying to sell us? Nothing really matters unless it's a life or death situation?
>Nobody forced these people to pre-order the game or buy it on launch day. They went and bought it before the reviews came out. It is entirely on them as consumers for failing to execute due diligence.
So it's the consumer's fault? Sure, I also check reviews first, but that's neither here nor there. HE BLATANTLY LIED. Why are you so eager to give him a pass on that?
>So what if the creator lied through their teeth? Plenty of people enjoyed the game for what it was anyway.
I did acknowledge that this situation sucks. Fraud is never ok, but neither are threats of violence.
My original point was and still is not to justify fraud, but to express sadness at the harmful lengths people will go to for their personal entertainment.
The maker of the game flat-out lied about what was in the game dozens of times. This isn't on consumers.
It's one thing to say "my pizza is the best in the world", and another to make tons of specific, concrete claims that are _simply false_ about the game. If you're not sure what I mean, see this Reddit thread which catalogs numerous statements by Murray, with source video or text, that were unarguably false:
This is a major reason why I refuse to get into the video game industry. I read on TIL last week that the video game industry makes more than the music and film industries combined, and it shows. Every mobile game utilizes unethical or at the very least shady practices. Console games are slightly better in stability and quality but even more sketchy and ruthless. The industry is run by greed. Reading the story about how Minecraft started, before Microsoft bought them, that is a true inspiration. Make games because you enjoy them and let money be an afterthought. Is there room for that anymore? I don’t think so. The major players crush any competition. Read about Ketchapp. The video game industry is dead, no it’s a zombie, alive but dead, sucking the souls out of employees and customers alike, and that’s sad. But maybe it’s for the better. Don’t we already spend too much time staring and screens and not spending time with people right next to us?
I share your concerns. It was a dinky little text-based Visual Basic game at a summer camp computer area that got me into programming in the first place. By the next summer I was teaching C++ to Ken Levine’s (creator of Bioshock, nice guy) nephew. True story.
All I’ve ever really wanted to do is make video games. I have always been fascinated with the ways an interactive narrative can evoke emotions in ways that prior forms of art could never do. Fans of Spec Ops: The Line will know exactly what I mean.
But every story of games development sounds more depressing and horrific than the next. Hours are long, pressures are high, fans are ruthless, and keeping a job depends on your game selling enough to justify a sequel (RIP, Mass Effect. You deserved better).
I always hold out the hope that development in game making frameworks will allow bedroom programmers to eventually create games on par with the big budget productions we have today, but games development is so talent-driven and expensive, I have never felt that that time is near in the way we have been lead to believe about other futuristic technologies like self-driving cars.
I agree that much of the games industry is a zombie these days. How I long for the halcyon days of the Playstation 2...
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?
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.
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.)
"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.
I can see how some might misinterpret that statement to mean that I am suggesting that the death threats were justified. I am not, and that is why I was explicit with my language explaining that it is an unacceptable crime that deserves severe legal consequences. The sentences that follow the "but" do not contradict my condemnation of anonymous death threats. Hopefully that makes things clear.
You're absolutely right! The structure exhibits significant opportunity for improvement. Here, let me propose an alternative structure that avoids the issue you so rightly and correctly highlight:
> Sean Murray received a lot of money and publicity based on very public and explicit lies regarding the tech of his game. Obviously death threats are unacceptable and the perpetrators deserve severe legal consequences.
Again, you're completely right. There should under no circumstances ever be any caveats in any way, shape, form, or manner that could be even remotely read to justify such horrific behavior.
It is also faintly possible that there might be other aspects of these events that may merit genuine discussion. Some people might go so far as to say that such aspects should be up for discussion independently of any horrific behavior that may have taken place.
Expressing this nuance does take some modicum of rhetorical skill, which not everyone has had the experience to properly acquire. With this in mind, it might be wise to consider if comments can be read charitably.
I think its that no-one thinks "Obviously death threats are unacceptable and the perpetrators deserve severe legal consequences" requires a but after it.
See my reply to lfam. In short, what I wrote after the "but" does not contradict what I wrote before it. e.g. "I went to the store but I didn't have any money."
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!
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.
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.
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]
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.
> “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.
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...
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] thread> "[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.
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.
The business logic doesn't hold up well here.
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.
> 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.
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.
But not strongly enough, apparently, to get that statement any higher than the fourth paragraph of your comment. Which tells me you're more interesting in flogging the bad game and its developers than you are in instances of actual, real-world harrassment.
This is the same thing that happened with gamergate too. "Harrassment!? Fine, whatever, there are bad apples. I'm not one of them, it's not relevant. Let's talk about how awful Those Women were instead."
I mean, look: it was a bad game. The developers oversold, underdelivered, and probably lied a bit too. The complaint has merit. But at some point the externalities of a situation mean we have to stop talking about meritorious complaints, because we're just egging on much worse behavior.
Harrassment may be unpleasant, but I suspect they would rather that than be fined all profits and sitting in prison.
But what this company did was fraud in my view. He should be fined or put in jail. So should any people who sent them death threats.
I, too, am bewildered by that line of thinking.
I emphasize with your core argument that sometimes we need to discuss the bad behavior out front, but people have different priorities - it doesn't make sense to hold everyone else to your particular mix of priorities.
People are literally being kidnapped or killed or starving and you're complaining about online harrassment.
Perspective is a great thing, but it applies to everyone, even you. I don't begrudge either of you your particular focuses or grievances, and you shouldn't begrudge anyone else's their own.
In the context of this discussion, about an article about online harassment, this is a very disingenuous straw man. Yes, there are other problems in the world, but this isn't the forum to debate them.
I was responding to a person who was saying that because death threats are worse than fraud, you can't talk about the fraud. I was making the comparison to far greater injustices to turn the same argument on them.
I find it hard to believe that you truly misunderstood my rhetorical tool as a call to discuss those injustices here.
You're making a big reach there. The parent comment is responding to the article, which is towing the developer line that the release wasn't that bad, they hit their expectations, it was just stuff like missing butterflies - none of which is true. The harassment issue is a problem, but I see nothing wrong with a comment correcting core problems with the article first.
Yea, no, sorry. The fact that he put that eight sentences in tells you absolutely nothing.
If you can find real fault with what he said, go ahead, but this is just nonsense. You're condemning someone who agrees with you.
But not bad enough to get that statement any higher than the fourth paragraph of your comment. Even Gamergate came in the 3rd paragraph. You're more interested in flogging a previous commenter than... well, you get the point.
The order of ideas does not necessarily represent their importance in an absolute frame of reference. When talking about lithium batteries you won't start with a disclaimer that you strongly condemn child labor in DRC cobalt mines.
Also, for my 4th paragraph, I'll just say that you're willing to grossly understate what the developers did which makes me think you are very biased about this, hence making a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to the least important part of a comment.
> and probably lied a bit too
Objective conversation should specifically reject externality. That's a fifth wave myth anyways.
Stealing and lying is definitely worse than being mean online.
We can't control the crazies. They will always be out there and it makes no sense to focus only on them every time they pop out of the woodwork.
In the US around 1 in 1000 people will murder someone in their life. So if you scam a million people then on average you scam around 1000 murderers. Getting death threats when you make that many murderers angry should be expected and actually getting killed is not out of the question. This is not a problem with the gaming community, this is a problem with society in general.
Killing someone is of course illegal, but I wouldn't go around taunting murderers unnecessary anyway. They are provably irrational so them getting punished wont stop them while I would still be dead.
But the vast majority of murderers know their victims and have some kind of relationship with them - spouse, significant other (at least at some point), drug dealer, relative of a victim, whatever.
"Video game customer" is not on that list.
When you put yourself out there in a public space, and especially when you're charging people money, you risk major backlash if you're caught lying about significant things. Does that warrant death threats? Of course not. Does it warrant criticism, protests, demands for refunds, and accusations of fraud on social media? Definitely.
If the game dev considers public backlash harassment, he should enter a new line of work and/or not lie to paying customers. Except for cases where the harassment turns into threats, he has no right to complain. He's the only one who put himself in this mess.
OK. I will, for the purpose of conversation, cede your point that there is some point beyond which even just, deserved, valid, polite, and correct complaints should be ignored because of the side-effects. How do you propose we determine when this point has been reached?
I live in a country (France) where such harassement (especially death threat) can and will be acted on by the police if reported, and regularly are. I agree with that policy, and I agree with the recent move by our government to make it easier to report online harassement.
I absolutely disagree with your statement that if a part of a group is rotten, no matter how small or big, then all of the group's complaints should be ignored to avoid drawing attention to the bad members. This is stupid on a lot of level, easily abused (don't like that group ? just infiltrate them and make them part of something bad ! a great plan used by all of your favorite dictators), and frankly I can't believe anyone smart would argue for that.
By that same logic, we should not heed the concerns of those harassed online because some of them have done harassment themselves ! Great plan there.
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.
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.
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.
i think it’s because they go to games for fun. if there’s a bug in a game, it ruins their fun. a bug in facebook— who cares? you can just come back tomorrow. and a bug in a saas product, slack or gmail is a reason to go home from work early.
How exactly do you reach the conclusion that gamers are entitled because they expected features explicitly said to be in the game by the lead designer and developer? Sure, gamers can be an ornery bunch, but in this instance Sean deserved everything he got short of the perpetual harassment and threats. He literally defrauded the people who bought his game, and that's not hyperbole.
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.
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."
That one. I was interested and followed development closely, but I waited and then passed.
What you call "salty" I call sharing my opinion on the topic of the article. Similarly, I suppose I could say you are an apologist, but I don't see how that gets us anywhere. I play video games and despise the way the industry is going. NMS was one of the worst offenders.
We’re not talking about salmonella lettuce or a blood test kit that doesn’t work or carcinogenic flame retardants here. This is a product of digital entertainment, with minuscule value to our overall society.
Nobody forced these people to pre-order the game or buy it on launch day. They went and bought it before the reviews came out. It is entirely on them as consumers for failing to execute due diligence.
So what if the creator lied through their teeth? Plenty of people enjoyed the game for what it was anyway. If an investor wants to sue for breach of contract, they can go for it. Otherwise, the consumers have no recourse. There is no fraud without a court judgement, just a bunch of pissed off consumers. It may suck but that’s the law. Change it if you don’t like it.
I know, but Sean did in the linked interview.
>We’re not talking about salmonella lettuce or a blood test kit that doesn’t work or carcinogenic flame retardants here. This is a product of digital entertainment, with minuscule value to our overall society.
What's your point? People shouldn't be pissed that he purposely lied about the game he was trying to sell us? Nothing really matters unless it's a life or death situation?
>Nobody forced these people to pre-order the game or buy it on launch day. They went and bought it before the reviews came out. It is entirely on them as consumers for failing to execute due diligence.
So it's the consumer's fault? Sure, I also check reviews first, but that's neither here nor there. HE BLATANTLY LIED. Why are you so eager to give him a pass on that?
>So what if the creator lied through their teeth? Plenty of people enjoyed the game for what it was anyway.
You're not a reasonable person.
My original point was and still is not to justify fraud, but to express sadness at the harmful lengths people will go to for their personal entertainment.
It's one thing to say "my pizza is the best in the world", and another to make tons of specific, concrete claims that are _simply false_ about the game. If you're not sure what I mean, see this Reddit thread which catalogs numerous statements by Murray, with source video or text, that were unarguably false:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...
I don't own NMS and have never played it. I think outrage is acceptable when people engage in false statements that border on fraud.
All I’ve ever really wanted to do is make video games. I have always been fascinated with the ways an interactive narrative can evoke emotions in ways that prior forms of art could never do. Fans of Spec Ops: The Line will know exactly what I mean.
But every story of games development sounds more depressing and horrific than the next. Hours are long, pressures are high, fans are ruthless, and keeping a job depends on your game selling enough to justify a sequel (RIP, Mass Effect. You deserved better).
I always hold out the hope that development in game making frameworks will allow bedroom programmers to eventually create games on par with the big budget productions we have today, but games development is so talent-driven and expensive, I have never felt that that time is near in the way we have been lead to believe about other futuristic technologies like self-driving cars.
I agree that much of the games industry is a zombie these days. How I long for the halcyon days of the Playstation 2...
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?
"Obviously death threats are unacceptable [...] but [...]".
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.
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.)
This whole argument is strongly reminiscent of attempts to discredit female game developers who were being harassed during GamerGate.
> Sean Murray received a lot of money and publicity based on very public and explicit lies regarding the tech of his game. Obviously death threats are unacceptable and the perpetrators deserve severe legal consequences.
Again, you're completely right. There should under no circumstances ever be any caveats in any way, shape, form, or manner that could be even remotely read to justify such horrific behavior.
It is also faintly possible that there might be other aspects of these events that may merit genuine discussion. Some people might go so far as to say that such aspects should be up for discussion independently of any horrific behavior that may have taken place.
Expressing this nuance does take some modicum of rhetorical skill, which not everyone has had the experience to properly acquire. With this in mind, it might be wise to consider if comments can be read charitably.
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!
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.
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.
You might also _really_ like butterflies.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.