This might be unpopular, but it feels like the “redemption” story around No Man’s Sky has become more of a cultural comfort narrative than an honest look at what happened.
Let’s be real — most of those updates were just delivering delayed promises, not generosity. The game we were originally sold was missing a lot of advertised features, and Hello Games never actually apologized for lying. On top of that, every update brings more bugs and half-fixed systems, and the community acts like free beta testers for Light No Fire, while still framing it all as “passion” and “commitment.”
It’s like Hello Games built a shoddy, unfinished building, declared it open anyway, and then decided to use it as a testing ground for their next building — and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.
So why do people keep buying into this narrative? Because it’s a comfortable story? Or is it somekind of parasocial relationship going on there?
NMS made 78 million in 2016, this can’t be compared to a failed AAA game or indies where devs walk away from financial failure, another emotional argument?
According to the number of upvotes, it seems that their angst is a reflection of the game industry in general. Hello Games had indeed performed to expectations by not walking away, but does that warrant mythologising the redemption arc? Even when the state of the game is buggy?
Because instead of the usual triple a studio promising the moon for sales then delivering a pebble and not giving a shit, it was a guy who got caught up in the hype and handled it badly, and then him and his small studio worked their asses off to make the game justify the price charged. I know it’s hard to drop the cynicism living in the modern world has instilled in us, but I genuinely think it was a collosal fuckup and not malicious, and they ACTUALLY put the time and effort in to deliver the promises they could and a fuckload more atuff that wasn’t. In a day and age of companies lying on purpose for profit and not giving a shit, it’s a breath of fresh air.
It’s still nothing like what it was promised to be, in fact. Sure, they added a lot of free content, a lot of updates, I’m sure fans are enjoying them… but it’s not what was promised as already in the game before launch.
Another fake redemption story is Cyberpunk. They fixed some of the bugs to make it playable, revamped the skill tree, and added paid DLC… cool? That doesn’t change the fact the game is missing half of the promised content, including some that was on the trailers.
That doesn’t change the fact the game is missing half of the promised content,
That’s just a flat out lie or a delusion.
The most famous example is how “the game was supposed to be like GTA” some people cry over. Source for that? A interview they did where they stated “we want to be more like Rockstar”. The interview was about development cycles, had nothing to do with the game itself, but one YouTuber saw it and made a video about how “Cyberpunk is going to be GTA in the future, expect bowling”, shit like that.
It was never supposed to be anything than it isn’t.
including some that was on the trailers.
I heard that argument bunch of times, someone even showed me a trailer that supposedly showed these “missing features”. The stuff missing? Wall-running and ripping off turrets. That’s it. That’s literally it. They gave a really good explanation as to why wall running is missing, it’s also a flavour feature, not like adding it back in would change the gameplay significantly, so people crying over that is just… weird to me.
The fact is that Cyberpunk was a victim of some of the most ridiculously over-the-top hype in gaming history. And when the game released in the state it did (which - to anyone who’s ever followed anything released by CDPR - was the most benign and obvious thing in the world), people lost their minds, because they were expecting The Gaming Messiah to show up and End All Gaming Suffering. Just stupid from the top down.
All I know about CP2077 was that the CEO actually admitted reputational damage to CDPR, which is already a class above Hello Games’ silence about their willingness to lie during initial launch.
I don’t think Hello Games lied as much as you may think. Sony lied, and others layered their own expectations on top.
HG turned to Sony for publishing and marketing help. Sony, like any game publisher, wants to get as many sales as possible, preferrably on release day to look the best (for further marketing when sales slow down: “X million dollars on release day”/“Y copies sold on release day” kind of stuff). So Sony had a huge hand in promoting the game, and undoubtedly crunched time on HG, reducing their ability to get what they wanted to out the door.
Plus, people hear what they want to hear and read what they want to read sometimes. Game journalists and streamers and influencers and such layered their expectation on each other, chalking up the game to more than was promised by HG, only to be disappointed when it wasn’t. Murray even said the day before its release that it “maybe isn’t the game you imagined”.
And sure, not to absolve HG of all the blame here, there was underdelivery and bugs. They got swept up in a storm of shit larger than they were ready for. They probably could have said more at the bungled release, but I wonder how much (if any) they couldn’t because of Sony’s hands in the PR. Iirc they were allowing returns of the game past normal return timelines? Given all of that, though, they committed to their game, even when Sony left, and even if players left and didn’t come back. That’s why people talk about it’s comeback story.
For Cyberpunk, though, I’m less supportive of that comeback story because CDPR had other majorly-known games (Witcher). They knew how game-dev-crunching and publisher pressure reduces their ability to deliver. They understood how marketing grows hype and expectations of their games. They even saw how NMS’s release went, and they still fumbled their release horribly. I’m happy for those that play CP2077 and enjoy it today, but I’m less on-board for that one.
Idk, idc. The game has been getting free updates for years and I enjoy it. Most devs would have ditched immediately.
Why should Hello Games ditch the game?
Because, as this article that you keep linking says, they already made bank with the broken product in the first place. They could have just taken the money and closed the studio, or at least rebranding and going for the same trick again and again, as so many other actually do. They did not do that, they chose to do the opposite, which was an incredibly bold decision at the time.
You also keep linking another article showing how they made so much money recently, like in 2022, but you forget that this is now, with hindsight. In 2016 just after release, it was more dangerous for them to keep working on a game nobody trusted anymore.
And for the record, I bought NMS in 2022, and liked it okay-ish. It’s far from the best game ever, but arguing like you do that “they only added stuff they said would be in the game in the first place” is clearly fallacious.
Because most other game developers would have crapped out the initial project and moved on.
Indeed. And even delayed fulfillment of the original promises is impressive given how vast the scope of the original pitch was. I’m just happy to have it, even if it took a couple years longer than expected to get.
Take a look at Star Citizen if you want to know the alternative, OP
Anthem in some ways is a better example because Start Citizen is never going to release, they can cruise on their promises until the company goes bankrupt. Anthem however was released in an unfinished state hardly reaching the hype it generated and then EA just cut their losses and left it like that.
Remember that HG made £40 million in 2022 from good people like you, of course, they are going to keep at it.
Remember that at that point the game was allready 8 years old had had several large updates. Not counting few spikes from the updates first four years the game had under 2000 player/month in steam. Financially looking the pragmatic choice would have been to stop the development, but they did not.
There has been several games from big publishers that were abandoned shortly after release, even if it still was possible to fix the game. Battleborn, Anthem, Concord. And even more games that are still in theory playable, but are just full if bugs or not fun to play.
But so far i can think only three games that had bad start, but devs kept working on it and eventually managed to make fun games. No mans sky, Fallout 76 and Cyperpunk 2077
Yes, I have already said this is commendable…in the gaming industry, but not in other industries in terms of project delivery, hence the building analogy in my post.
Why would you force other industry term on the gaming industry? Thats just silly. It like saying apple is a bad fruit because it makes for a lousy boat.
Gaming is pretty unique platform in a way where the product is measured by unquantifiable metric called fun, but you want to compare it in standards of other products.
In the end they kept working on a bad product where others would have stopped and ended making it good.
Ain’t that the absurdity? It is a silly analogy, and they are asymmetrical; if the same action applies, would it have a different reaction in the other place? Would Hello Games have the reputation as they have now?
“Why would you force other industry terms on the gaming industry?” Judging from the reply here…well, you tell me…
If i must abide by your original metafora i would say:
They promised grandiose skycraper and delivered shotty apartment complex and the tenant who had bought the apartments were understandably angry. Very few of the tenants stayed anyway, but by all means the building was a failure to the point it would be completelly understandable to have the whole building just bulldozed.
But where most companies would just disbanded and or disapeared with the money, they kept working on the building. Added new floors, made the yard nicer, lowered the prices of the apartments and the whole time tried their best to keep the remaining few people living there happy. And after few years (decates really if you think how much faster gaming industry develops than housing) the place started to be closer what the original brochure said.
Eventually new people start to get intrested about the apartments and the people who originally bought the apartments started to move back in without paying any additional fees. And while the windows were little smaller and the shower tiling were little different than originally promised, people seem to like living there. In a way the constant repairs and the new additions to the place, make it even better to some people.
The point that makes that building special is that nine times out of ten, in these situations the tenants are left with unhabitable home or even closed down building. And even more often the tenants need to pay additional fees to acces the fixed parts of the building.
Is this purely genorosity from the builder? Of course not. They also have bills to pay and in the end its their livelyhood and they surely have investers waiting a return for their money. But is it monumental showing of backbone from the builder to not walk away from the project, but keep working on it. Absolutelly.
and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.
Except it doesn’t. It’s been nominated for Stream’s Labour of Love award six times in the past ten years, and never won it. In fact it’s never won any Steam Awards. It won Best Ongoing at the Game Awards twice, out of a decade of being ongoing, and it won a similar award from PC Gamer once.
A redemption arc implies fucking up in the first place and working to rectify the previous mistakes.
They lied and the game was missing a lot of features at launch, but now all those features (and more) are in the game, which is still being updated for free a decade later.
I don’t like the game, and I wish the devs acted differently so that a redemption arc wasn’t needed in the first place, but it is what it is. The devs worked their asses off, the game is now playable and feature complete and is still being updated, and from the looks of it Hello Games have learned from their mistakes and are not promising the moon for their next game.
I mean, if the game is actually good with its common space tropes as their marketing materials, instead of having the need to be culturally reframed into a “chill sandbox”. 10 years of disjointed game mechanics and bugs still implies bad game design.
Instead of completely changing the game into something else, they opted to add features that complement the original gameplay loop, and lots of people love what the game has to offer.
There’s nothing wrong with not liking NMS, and as I said, I don’t like it either, but I wouldn’t say that the game doesn’t fit the promises made just because you don’t like it. From what I remember, they promised a sandbox game with a big universe and tons of planets to explore along with your friends. NMS currently has that, plus base building, ship customization, and more. All these systems are subservient to the main gameplay loop of going to planet -> gathering resources -> building more stuff, but it’s like that for every sandbox game. I don’t like Minecraft and Factorio either, but like, it’s my opinion. NMS never promised a 10 hrs story driven experience and cinematic cutscenes.
