5 ms·

ASA Investigating No Man’s Sky’s Steam Advertising

51 points by MattBearman 10y ago

shostack 10y ago
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?
- Paul_S 10y ago
  A lot of people claim they got a refund after more than 2 hours but it's a case by case thing so I think as the stream of people asking for refunds hit a critical point they stopped and even put a reminder on the store page saying they will not refund beyond the normal 2 hours. I think that's fair. The game has an overwhelmingly negative rating and people keep buying it. Marketing genius.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  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.
youdontknowtho 10y ago
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.
- tommica 10y ago
  If I recall correctly, I think some people had an issue with the game having nSync enabled by default, and that editing a config file to disable it helped them
  - youdontknowtho 10y ago
    Ahhh...I will try that when I get home. Cause, let's face it...I waited for two years to play the effing thing. I'm going to play it for a while more.
- ablation 10y ago
  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?
  - youdontknowtho 10y ago
    Don't get me wrong, for what it is, if you don't think about the price...it's kind of cool. Since a good glass of scotch can cost more than a game...sure why not. EDIT: Also, at the length of a comment grows the probability of hyperbole being cranked up approaches 1.
    - qplex 10y ago
      I think it is sort of hard to asses the "true value" of a game, but I do agree with you that No Man's Sky is No Where Close of being worth $60 in comparison to other games.
  - crispyambulance 10y ago
    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.
andybak 10y ago
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 10y ago
  When did multicrew happen? The game is on life support as the company is working on other projects. They keep missing all the deadlines.
  - BBlarat 10y ago
    It's only in beta as of now, but will probably be released in a couple of weeks or so. Is the game really on life support though? I only play sporadically and don't really keep up to date with the news, other than the ones you get in the launcher and it seems to be a healthy game as far as I can tell.
    - Paul_S 10y ago
      You are lying. Multi crew is not in beta and will not be shipping any time soon, not in the next update and certainly not this year. New Horizons was meant to be released in parts, first of which was meant to be released in Q1, was released in May with smaller scope (and New Horizons was originally slated for 2015!). There are people working on it, yes, but just enough to keep it ticking along.
  - ergo14 10y ago
    Life support? They posted their numbers and they are doing great. New content is being added quite often.
  - danielvf 10y ago
    Elite Dangerous isn't remotely on life support. They are still releasing major new features constantly. You can now launch fighters from your starship and fly them, or hire others to fly escort missions with you.
therealasdf 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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 10y ago
      The new Peter Molyneux?
      - radiorental 10y ago
        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 10y ago
        You're thinking of Will Wright; Peter Molyneux's classic fame was Populous and Black and White, and recent controversy Godus.
radiorental 10y ago
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.
FussyZeus 10y ago
> “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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    Manual action isn't needed when the policies are already good.
qplex 10y ago
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.

51 points by MattBearman 10y ago

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?

Paul_S 10y ago
A lot of people claim they got a refund after more than 2 hours but it's a case by case thing so I think as the stream of people asking for refunds hit a critical point they stopped and even put a reminder on the store page saying they will not refund beyond the normal 2 hours. I think that's fair. The game has an overwhelmingly negative rating and people keep buying it. Marketing genius.
Mithaldu 10y ago
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.

youdontknowtho 10y ago

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.

tommica 10y ago
If I recall correctly, I think some people had an issue with the game having nSync enabled by default, and that editing a config file to disable it helped them
- youdontknowtho 10y ago
  Ahhh...I will try that when I get home. Cause, let's face it...I waited for two years to play the effing thing. I'm going to play it for a while more.
ablation 10y ago
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?
- youdontknowtho 10y ago
  Don't get me wrong, for what it is, if you don't think about the price...it's kind of cool. Since a good glass of scotch can cost more than a game...sure why not. EDIT: Also, at the length of a comment grows the probability of hyperbole being cranked up approaches 1.
  - qplex 10y ago
    I think it is sort of hard to asses the "true value" of a game, but I do agree with you that No Man's Sky is No Where Close of being worth $60 in comparison to other games.
- crispyambulance 10y ago
  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.

andybak 10y ago

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 10y ago
When did multicrew happen? The game is on life support as the company is working on other projects. They keep missing all the deadlines.
- BBlarat 10y ago
  It's only in beta as of now, but will probably be released in a couple of weeks or so. Is the game really on life support though? I only play sporadically and don't really keep up to date with the news, other than the ones you get in the launcher and it seems to be a healthy game as far as I can tell.
  - Paul_S 10y ago
    You are lying. Multi crew is not in beta and will not be shipping any time soon, not in the next update and certainly not this year. New Horizons was meant to be released in parts, first of which was meant to be released in Q1, was released in May with smaller scope (and New Horizons was originally slated for 2015!). There are people working on it, yes, but just enough to keep it ticking along.
- ergo14 10y ago
  Life support? They posted their numbers and they are doing great. New content is being added quite often.
- danielvf 10y ago
  Elite Dangerous isn't remotely on life support. They are still releasing major new features constantly. You can now launch fighters from your starship and fly them, or hire others to fly escort missions with you.

therealasdf 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    The new Peter Molyneux?
    - radiorental 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        You're thinking of Will Wright; Peter Molyneux's classic fame was Populous and Black and White, and recent controversy Godus.

radiorental 10y ago

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.

FussyZeus 10y ago

> “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 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  Manual action isn't needed when the policies are already good.

qplex 10y ago

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.