7 ms·

No Man’s Sky developer Sean Murray: ‘It was as bad as things can get’

76 points by noir-york 8y ago

bribroder 8y ago
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_mans_sky_we_were_sold_on_a_big_list/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no... > "[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 8y ago
  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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- CM30 8y ago
  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? The business logic doesn't hold up well here.
fred_is_fred 8y ago
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?
- vernie 8y ago
  What if they used a pseudonym or somebody else's name?
  - fred_is_fred 8y ago
    That's probably the best reason. Even if tied to an email address that could be faked or hacked or just a throwaway.
- 394549 8y ago
  > 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.
  - fred_is_fred 8y ago
    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.
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    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.
- aw3c2 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching
y4mi 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
nolok 8y ago
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.
- ajross 8y ago
  > 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.
rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
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.
- hsljekskfh 8y ago
  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.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    >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.
    - hsljekskfh 8y ago
      i didn’t play nms and missed out on the hype. i wasn’t really talking about this specific story.
root_axis 8y ago
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 8y ago
  The problem is your second sentence which is structured like this: "Obviously death threats are unacceptable [...] but [...]".
  - CryoLogic 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      > 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.)
makecheck 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
krylon 8y ago
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.
ben509 8y ago
> 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.
013a 8y ago
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 8y ago
  I hoped that link would be this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik
  - Randin 8y ago
    That's pretty damning.
gottam 8y ago
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.
bufferoverflow 8y ago
> “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.
jefe_ 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
> 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.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Yeah also "coded a near-infinite universe" is exactly the kind of misleading nonsense that got them into this trouble in the first place.
- watwut 8y ago
  "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.
  - zamalek 8y ago
    You cannot harass a legal entity. It has no emotions. That is precisely why I drew a clear line between Murray and Hello Games.
    - watwut 8y ago
      You can harass employees of legal entity which is what happened. Besides, emotions are not necessary for harassment.
nortiero 8y ago
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.
dorkwood 8y ago
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.

76 points by noir-york 8y ago

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_mans_sky_we_were_sold_on_a_big_list/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no... > "[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 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
CM30 8y ago
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? The business logic doesn't hold up well here.

fred_is_fred 8y ago

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?

vernie 8y ago
What if they used a pseudonym or somebody else's name?
- fred_is_fred 8y ago
  That's probably the best reason. Even if tied to an email address that could be faked or hacked or just a throwaway.
394549 8y ago
> 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.
- fred_is_fred 8y ago
  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.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  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.
aw3c2 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching

y4mi 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

nolok 8y ago

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.

ajross 8y ago
> 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.

rm_-rf_slash 8y ago

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.

hsljekskfh 8y ago
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.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >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.
  - hsljekskfh 8y ago
    i didn’t play nms and missed out on the hype. i wasn’t really talking about this specific story.

root_axis 8y ago

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 8y ago
The problem is your second sentence which is structured like this: "Obviously death threats are unacceptable [...] but [...]".
- CryoLogic 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    > 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.)

makecheck 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

krylon 8y ago

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.

ben509 8y ago

> 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.

013a 8y ago

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 8y ago
I hoped that link would be this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik
- Randin 8y ago
  That's pretty damning.

gottam 8y ago

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.

bufferoverflow 8y ago

> “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.

jefe_ 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago

> 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.

IshKebab 8y ago
Yeah also "coded a near-infinite universe" is exactly the kind of misleading nonsense that got them into this trouble in the first place.
watwut 8y ago
"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.
- zamalek 8y ago
  You cannot harass a legal entity. It has no emotions. That is precisely why I drew a clear line between Murray and Hello Games.
  - watwut 8y ago
    You can harass employees of legal entity which is what happened. Besides, emotions are not necessary for harassment.

nortiero 8y ago

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.

dorkwood 8y ago

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.