Once again, please do more research. At this point you've ignored the fact that the marketing materials and Sean's own words prior and after release don't match up with the product, and somehow are absolving him of not being honest to the consumers. That's how things don't change, and poor little indie studio excuse doesn't cut it. If other developers can be honest, big or small, and come clean when they've fucked up, HG can do the same. As it stands, they have not, and no amount of BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE WAITED justifies the hoops consumers have to go through to find out if a game has a touted feature or not.
When you buy a game day 1 vs waiting for critic reviews and community feedback, you're explicitly endorsing bullshit, pre-release marketing. It's pretty disingenuous to keep acting like you have to be some sort of video game scientist to track down reviews and impressions. That's ridiculous. Plus, anybody who is so ignorant as to how to find a review of a video game, is probably not in the group of people who even knew about any of the stuff that didn't make the game. They just knew it was a space fly-aroundy game that was getting mega hype. Their disappointment wasn't about "hey, Sean Murray told me I could land on asteroids!" it was "hey, this game is fucking boring".
I'm not interested in doing more research to get to the bottom of Sean "Literally Hillary Clinton" Murray's lies. Marketing is inherently bullshit and things don't change because it works. I'm not trying to endorse dishonest marketing. I'm also not going to endorse/feel sympathy for the people who fall for it so easily, to the point where they feel that having to wait a few hours longer than the next guy to figure out whether or not a product is worth your time and money is too great of an injustice to bear. Those people are why bullshit video game marketing doesn't change.
I'd say many people did see it coming. The biggest and still most solid argument is where they came from. I mean from a game like Joe Danger comes TO THE BIGGEST AND BEST GAME EVER, it just didn't seem likely.
Might sound mean but expecting a small indie studio to be making an amazing Triple A game is just silly.
Yep. Yep. I know it sounds like I'm ranting in defense of Sean with my posts here (admittedly, I kind of am but mostly to play Devils advocate to the overblown outrage) but, really, I think there are three entities that share responsibility for the undeserved hype and subsequent fallout.
Sean - wrote a bunch of checks he can't cash. Was it maliciously misleading or did he want to put EVERYTHING in his game and, in the end, just couldn't get it done? He shouldn't, and won't, be absolved completely. Unless they patch this up or something, he'll always be that guy who lied to us about No Man's Sky.
Sony - First party software production has had too many lapses this gen and they wanted an exclusive that could sell systems so... they go out and pay for a pretty much unknown, small indie team's space/survival game which, to a lot of observers was straight ambiguous in terms of "what is this really" from the get-go. A lot of people had the good judgement to question whether a team such as HG could pull this off. A lot of people looked at all the media released in the lead up to launch and, pretty much correctly, called how empty and pointless it was. Either Sony was facilitating/encouraging the lies to protect their investment, or they were so disconnected from the production that they had as little idea of what to expect as we did. Tasking this team with creating a AAA priced/featured game that they're going to throw on stage at the biggest conferences, support with massive marketing and pimp as a big time console exclusive was at best a huge error in judgement and, at worst, deliberately misleading in an attempt to pad their exclusive lineup.
Consumers - I can't think of many mass-consumed products that have as many avenues/communities that are great for criticism than gaming. Massive forums, gaming permeates reddit (when that game came out, the front page was littered with 'boohoo NMS sucks'), all sorts of publications do reviews, etc. If you've got a problem with dishonest pre-release marketing and you're also willing to buy a hugely ambitious game from a tiny, previously unknown developer without waiting to find out what critics and other gamers think of the final product, you're a huge part of the problem. Does it excuse dishonest marketing? No, but it sure as hell enables it. Frankly, if you want to put Murray in front of a firing squad or have this follow him around his whole career because you're mad that your dumb, uninformed purchase was a waste of $60, I'm gonna give you about as much sympathy as someone who wiped their ass with $60.
