Sony Exec Responds to No Man's Sky Controversy

I do think that the development team need to be candid and give us something to go on. No updates since the end of September is not good enough when you consider that this was a game billed as being regularly updated and to have no indication of what and when these may appear, is not going to help Hello Games build bridges with their community.

People are forgetting NMS did do something right the first time, and that is charge 60$ for an unfinished space sim after telling everyone it was ready! you see they raked in the cash, and blew the game off themselves so this was the first time a game has charge 60$ for an early alpha and claimed its finished

Just some dumbass spin doctor who talks a lot without actually saying anything. I'm not even convinced he knows who Sean Murray is. First of all, stop saying it hasn't been done before. Daggerfall did it. 20 years ago. And second, there's no award for "most ambition". I've thought of bigger concepts while taking a shit and unless they actually end up becoming something I wont expect people to start wiping my ass for me, even if the paper does look better than No Man's Sky. And lastly, who cares that it was six people?? No one forced them at gunpoint to lie and lie and lie that they could make this game when it was apparent to them for months and maybe even years that they couldn't. It's saying something when the most honesty that Hello Games has ever showed was in a deleted tweet. 6 people, 100 people, a gerbil, there's no excuse for lying, especially when it made them millionaires.

Sean Murray - the new Peter Molyneux.

I want to hear what Sean Murray has to say about what this Playstation executive Shawn Layden said. Layden says that "I think what we learned from that is that we don't want to stifle ambition. We don't want to stifle creativity," Considering that I've heard that Sean said he was pressured into releasing No Man's Sky prior to his wanting to. What is Sony's defense for this?

"Incredible vision" is one thing, but showing people things in a trailer that literally aren't even in the game is blatant false advertising, and they deserved every little bit of the crap they got for it.

The gaming industry is where everybody has the courage to say 'yes', regardless of the facts.

Is this going to be in the game? Yes.

Is this going to look like it did at E3? Yes.

Is this a great game worthy of hype? All the media says yes.

Such callous disregard for consumer trust is not courage. It's self-centred greed, and they do it because they know they can "get away" with it. Sure, they may lose their reputation, and may even get investigated for misleading advertising, but at the end of the day all that extra sales simply overwhelm the cons in the fool-proof plan of fooling consumers.

The 2 difficult questions this guy is asked - about NMS and the power of Scorpio - and he sidesteps them without actually answering them.

Phil Spencer is a far better representative than this guy.

I had my doubts. Never bought into the hype. Sean Murray always appeared shady to me. Now I'm even more vigilant whenever I hear "procedurally generated" thrown around.

Sony promoted this game like it was the second coming of Christ from beginning to end. There's no way they didn't know prior to launch that the product wasn't ready. It was a $60 game that should have been $30 at most, had tons of missing features, and a large number of glitches. Now that they've squeezed as much money from people as they can they then shift their opinion to try and match what gamers are saying just so they can sound like the good guy, like a sociopath that fakes human emotion to get people to trust them.

These apologetic comments from companies only amount to something if they learned their lesson. In this case, the lesson is that you should do some research and follow-ups with developers on the product that you are promoting to make sure it is of good quality. These are the same people that promoted Driveclub when it released at a horribly broken state, promoted SFV with missing features, and promoted 7 Days to Die which might be the most horrific port of any game I have ever played (insane amounts of glitches, missing content, bad performance, etc.) Sounds to me like Sony never learned their lesson, and I doubt they ever will.

Sometimes, something isn't done in gaming for a good reason. I would put procedurally generated worlds into that category... at least as far as that being the main draw of why people are supposed to play a game and continue playing it for a good length of time. I knew it would turn out to be meaningless excess and that's exactly what it was. Digital diarrhea. They forgot to build an actual game around it, and I could see it coming from a mile away from all the hype leading up to its release.

With Street Fighter V and No Man's Sky having fooled people, can we kindly stop and agree to not give a company any of our money when they have the balls to charge full retail price for an unfinished product? Can that not be tacked onto the ever-growing list of disgusting business practices in gaming?

Sure... but u make 60 buck easy at first go.

Can anyone explain to me how No Man's Sky is supposedly one of it's kind when we have many open world sandbox games littering Steam? As far as I know, Starbound blows NMS to bits and pieces in terms of ambition with far more options, it costs far less, got far far higher critical reviews is way more fun, graphics be damned (Not that NMS is anything to brag about anyway).

NMS overpromised but hey, who cares, everyone already paid Hello games for it right? They had huge ambitions towards the size of their wallets and it shows. They did an awesome job in that respect.

So Hello Games couldn't have any help from Sony for an ambitious game concept that 6 people need to finish before Sony makes them rush the release. But Team Ico gets 10 years for a full staff to finish a PS2 game, and remake it for 2 more console generations before having to release it.

Sony clearly did not give a shit about this being good, they were just there for the hype and cash-in.

They really should have just released this as a $20 Steam Early Access game.

Clearly it wasn't ready for Prime-Time, so that would have at least allowed them to charge a fair price while still developing the game.

Not to mention avoiding all the hate and dissension.

Its nice that they are selling a "vision" for a nonexisting game for 60. Despicable all of them. Hello games and Sony both

"the gaming industry is where everybody has the courage to say 'yes.'"

Sometimes it takes more courage to say 'no'.

Well if you can't get there in the first go DON'T CHARGE $60 FOR IT! They'll have to have huge cajones if they even dare to think about charging money for any updates that add stuff to the game that should've been in there from the start.

Sony couldn't throw some dollars their way to increase the staff? Maybe delayed the game to meet the promised quality standards? Hello Games might have been overly ambitious, but Sony still had to okay the game. It's just as much on them.

it needs random quests to do when you arrive on a planet, like hunting a rare aggressive animal, or saving some npcs from somthing or mine certain stuff for npcs, basically if they rip of some skyrim style quests it could be good

O Thank god I did not get this game and got Elite Dangerous instead for the xbone

They have to add some great new features to this game or its gonna be a lost cause. Going from planet to planet, only to scan an animal that looks pretty much the same as the other animals you already saw, with one minor change like the removal of a tail, and shooting big gold rocks got stale in about two days. Game is interesting, but incredibly redundant and bare bones.

I really hope they release an update at some point that turns it into the game they said, but I'm not holding my breath, or they could just make it vr compatible and ill forgive them too...

Stuck at work and cant wait for your next fix of procedurally generated entertainment? Open up microsoft excel and hold the down arrow.

It was kindof Sony's fault for pushing this up to the $60 price point when it was originally showcased as an indie title. I don't think the pressure to commit to more than this small team could handle and develop a AAA game would be there if they got to make the indie game they originally wanted for $30.

I really admire this statement:
"We don't want to put people into slots where they must execute against an action adventure path or a fighting path or a shooting path. Perhaps over time [No Man's Sky] will reveal itself to be all it can be."

This is critical in today's publishing world - this shows a willingness to step outside of the "safe zone" of "yet another Battlefield".

Honestly never understood the hype in the first place.

I got an email from them (HG) the other day, following up on a bug I reported. That was something.

"Perhaps over time [No Man's Sky] will reveal itself to be all it can be." Wow, yes perhaps that $60 product you sold will be worth it, only time will tell. Essentially, pre-order now so that you can play the game advertised 2 years after release, perhaps. These companies are selling us a seed at the full price of a fruit and tell us to watch it grow and perhaps, perhaps, we'll get an apple in 5 years. That's not acceptable.