Global gaming community worked itself up into a frenzy forming a perfect nerdstorm filled with hate and frustration over the release of the highly anticipated multiplatform game No Man's Sky. Hype train had chugged along for three years gaining momentum from each expo, video, interview and taste of the upcoming space exploration/action game a la Elite topped with gameplay and flight on the planets themselves. The scope was beyond comprehension: 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets with riches beyond measure to be looted, flora and fauna to be studied (and harvested) and 3 alien races to compete with for everything. Develop your avatar, gear and ship, fight the good or bad fight, gather stuff or just fly around aimlessly and three quest paths through the game. Whatever was asked from the developers, they confirmed, multiplayer - yes, planetary physics and planets orbiting a star - yes, factions and feuds -yes and the list goes on and on.
Nobody was surprised when the initial sales were strong, PS4 got a week's headstart and that is when flies started to appear in the ointment. Reports were pouring in, the game was missing this and that and those reports kept coming. First confirmed player meeting happened a couple of days in and the only problem was the players were in fact unable to detect each other in any way, this was the first big lie the community latched on to, every gaming site worth their salt was writing about this and making youtube videos. The hate train had left the station and with a bug filled PC launch this train far surpassed the hype one in just a couple of days. Gamers were livid. The sympathetic lead designer was receiving death threats left and right, all top gaming media outlets were lynching Hello Games over and over and over. Metacritic stands at the moment at 71/PS4, 60/PC and that just tells us we are talking about throrough mediocrity
Majority of the clients have been sold digitally. There are physical versions of both but we shall focus on Steam, because they did something unprecedented: waived the requirements for a refund which normally are that within 14days of purchase games that have been played for less than 2 hours can be refunded.
We can't know the exact numbers but we can get pretty close with SteamSpy, amount of players:750000, return percentage 3-6% equating to 22500-45000 copies returned. DeusEx: Mankind Divided: 1%. At worst you are looking at a loss of sales of 5% when you basically release a game that is not even close to what was implied. Major parts that were promised were not delivered and have not been promised to be added. In cash this is (for the Steam part) sales 45M, returns 1.35M.
- planetary physics
- ship classes with meaningful differentiation
- faction reputation with meaningful gameplay impact
- homogenous resource availability
- asteroid landings
- space station and fleet destruction
- large fleets
- traveling freighters
- large scale battles the player can join
- in-atmosphere battles
- NPCs outside trading posts and other docks
- ringed planets
- sand planets
- flying between stars (as opposed to warping via the Galactic interface)
- complex creature behaviour including environmental interaction
- rivers
- points of interest such as large structures and crashed freighters
- hacking locked doors
- radio chatter
- interaction with other players
Full version (/u/Cymen90 reddit)
This could well be a start of a trend, focus on hype, promise everything, deliver something and expect to return 5% - surely it takes special effort to deliver less than Hello Games did with NMS. Numbers were taken a week ago and the trend is up again already so even the dip from returns is self correcting in some cases it seems.
As for me, I think the game is great. I never pay attention to hype and purchase majority after discounts set in, this time I bought at release and was not disappointed because I did not expect anything other than a pretty space romp and I got it. Have played over 80h and will continue to do so when content is added.
There is no cost for lying to gamers, go right ahead!
