Racing Turtles

man i doubt any gaming controvery will ever top no man’s sky

like it had this absolutely massive marketing campaign, had huge backing from sony, sean murray even had televised appearances on american talk shows to show off his revolutionary new game and to talk about features in the game

and then the game came out and it was all fake. everything. every single screenshot, piece of footage, every single promised feature was all a lie. none of that was in the game. 

not even fucking multiplayer. 

they spent so much time in the marketing talking about the multiplayer and how every player was part of an interconnected universe and that, though unlikely due to the sheer size of the universe, players would be able to meet and interact with one-another

and then in less than a week two players “found” each other and it turned out the multiplayer was completely fake. there was no multiplayer. none of it was real. 

and then

everyone involved with the game, at least all of the most publicly recognizable people involved, fucking vanished

and the office hello games was using was abandoned

nobody knows where hello games went or where sean murray is 

a small team of indie developers sold the gaming community a lie, tricked one of the biggest multimedia companies in the world in to backing them, and then vanished 

nothing will ever top that. nothing will ever top hello games exploiting the hype and preorder culture surrounding video games for a profit and then running off with the money. i fucking dare the industry to top that. 

Hello Games is the fucking victim. They had no say in the marketing. Sean Murray had no experience in talking on tv. Sony pretty much forced them to making all those ‘false claims’ in order to boost sales. Sony made the whole world expect AAA 5 star content from a team of 16 people who had no experience making such a title. Partway after production began, their office was destroyed along with almost all of their equipment and progress. Sony made them put out on unfinished game, instead of letting it be pushed back and done properly. After the game released and started getting shit, a spokesperson from Sony went out and said he was disappointed in Sean Murray’s marketing strategy, blaming him for their mistakes. Hello Games and Sean Murray probably disappeared out of fucking shame and ridicule, knowing they can never make another game ever again. Do you really think that a bunch of greedy, stickler, tight-asses like Sony would let tiny little Hello Games rob them of millions of dollars and run away into the night? They are known for fighting tooth and nail to keep anything they get their grimy claws on.

also they didn’t disappear at all, they’ve actually been continuing to push out (free) updates for nms, they just had to leave their office cuz they were getting death threats and harassment on twitter, esp directed at the trans programmer on the team, and people were literally showing up at their office

This is the kind of tone we hope to achieve here

man i doubt any gaming controvery will ever top no man’s sky

like it had this absolutely massive marketing campaign, had huge backing from sony, sean murray even had televised appearances on american talk shows to show off his revolutionary new game and to talk about features in the game

and then the game came out and it was all fake. everything. every single screenshot, piece of footage, every single promised feature was all a lie. none of that was in the game. 

not even fucking multiplayer. 

they spent so much time in the marketing talking about the multiplayer and how every player was part of an interconnected universe and that, though unlikely due to the sheer size of the universe, players would be able to meet and interact with one-another

and then in less than a week two players “found” each other and it turned out the multiplayer was completely fake. there was no multiplayer. none of it was real. 

and then

everyone involved with the game, at least all of the most publicly recognizable people involved, fucking vanished

and the office hello games was using was abandoned

nobody knows where hello games went or where sean murray is 

a small team of indie developers sold the gaming community a lie, tricked one of the biggest multimedia companies in the world in to backing them, and then vanished 

nothing will ever top that. nothing will ever top hello games exploiting the hype and preorder culture surrounding video games for a profit and then running off with the money. i fucking dare the industry to top that. 

I really hope this entire debacle forces a change in the industry in a positive way where people start to actually be just the slightest bit more sceptical about trailers, screenshots, preordering and all that

I just want to explain some errors in this.

1. Hello Games were not the ones responsible for this. When that first trailer released, they didn’t want to show it. They knew the trailer didn’t match the game, and they wanted at least six more months before a trailer release. The Publisher, Sony, basically gave them the ultimatum of “Show the trailer or we scrap the whole project”

2. All of those features that were promised but aren’t in the game? Also not Hello Games fault. A year ago they said they didn’t think the game would be ready for another 2-3 years, that there was so much stuff people wanted in it that they felt they should add before they could release it. Also, multiplayer wasn’t even something they planned on, and they never said it would be in the game. The game was even listed on Steam as a single player game, it has never been advertised as multiplayer. The only multiplayer feature advertised was that when a player names things, those names are online and everyone can see them. That’s it. So, again, not Hello Games fault, Sony gave them another “Do this now or we scrap the project” ultimatum.

3. A lot of features people claim were advertised that weren’t in the game were never advertised in the first place. People took things said by people with absolutely no official ties to the game as fact. so many things people expected were never actually things at all. They were things mentioned by live streamers and gaming news channels as features that could possibly exist based on the 20 minutes of footage that existed. They were theories that fans took as facts.

Now, I’m not saying the game wasn’t awful, what I’m saying is the fans aren’t the only ones getting screwed over by this. Hello Games was an indie company trying their best, and a shitty publisher gave them impossible deadlines, made them show footage that didn’t match the actual product and forced the game out before it was ready.

Sony took what should have been an amazing game for 2018-2019, and forced it to be a shitty game now instead. And because of that, those developers, who quit their jobs at huge companies to do this, will probably not be able to work in the industry anymore. Hell, pretty sure one of them is homeless, since the project lead sold his house to start the project.

This is not Hello Games fault, this is Sony’s fault, they were the ones in charge of advertising, they were the ones forcing out false trailers and telling lies about the game, not Hello Games.