During the build up to No Man's Sky's launch, a lot of the marketing push came from interviews with Sean Murray, the game's director. Unfortunately, once the game came out, a lot of people felt like the game was over promised and ultimately under-delivered. It turns out that even Sony Worldwide Studios President, Shuhei Yoshida, thinks No Man's Sky's PR strategy was pretty bad.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Shuhei Yoshida was asked to share his opinion on No Man's Sky and while he does enjoy the game, he “understands some of the criticisms”.
“I understand some of the criticisms especially Sean Murray is getting because he sounded like he was promising more features in the game from day one. It wasn't a great PR strategy, because he didn't have a PR person helping him, and in the end he is an indie developer. But he says their plan is to continue to develop No Man's Sky features and such, and I'm looking forward to continuing to play the game.”
Sony did help advertise No Man's Sky in the build up to launch by featuring the game during E3 and pushing it heavily on PS4 but from the sounds of it, they didn't provide much PR coaching, which probably would have helped in this case.
KitGuru Says: Given how things turned out with No Man's Sky, they probably should have hired some outside help for PR. Perhaps Hello Games will keep that in mind for future game launches.
The game is done for. It failed, and it will be forgotten after just couple of years. It’s not even worth half the price, it’s a disappointing failure. Refund if you bought it, then put your money towards Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. NO OTHER DEVELOPER will deliver you a good space sim game you deserve, EXCEPT Chris Roberts, who has already some big games, even though dated, hanging on his name. If you have been living under a rock, or have not been born in the ’90s, then go back and play Wing Commander, Starlancer, Freelancer and then try out the Star Citizen public alpha. It is already at a point where it is surpassing the big triple A games, including ALL GTAs, Mafia and any open world games you’ve ever played in your life, it is worth more than what EA would charge for their crappy Deluxe edition games on Origin, and comparing it to NMS, it’s already far far far ahead.
To be fair to Hello Games their entire portfolio consisted of mobile games so for what they were able to achieve with No Mans Sky was quite a big step forward. It’s probably because of that that everything went wrong though, as a games release is the most important time for its longevity and hype control is something that takes a lot of skill and planning to get just right
Right now Chris Roberts has promised us loads and shown us little. Sound familiar? Unlike No Mans Sky I’ve put my money into Star Citizen but until we’ve got something worthy to prove the hype its built up is deserved I would tread carefully when bigging it up otherwise it’ll just follow the same fate. 2+ years of delays is no laughing matter
Their only game that I know of is Joe Danger tbh
I would disagree with that. He has shown us a lot (technical achievements rather than bulk content) and they are making good progress. Just look at how some of the ships have evolved over the last few years e.g. the Constellation. And of course, this is all happening whilst he is building the company from the ground up.
Also the game isn’t really delayed. The issue is that as the scope of the project grew (and by a vast amount), RSI didn’t publicly push back the deadline to accommodate this as they assumed the average backer would figure out the obvious; more content takes more time to make, and then you have the issue of hiring staff and making office space for them. If they were just making SQ42 then sure, complaints would be just. But expecting a ground breaking MMO AAA game and a AAA campaign to be made in 2-3 years is asking for more than a miracle.
Though unlike Hello Games at least RSI has the man power and money to back up their claims to the game. Why people thought a tiny indy studio could make such a big game was baffling, however can a ~350 man studio with ~$125m do it? Probably!
I’m not usually one to nitpick a comment, because you do raise some good points, but I do wonder how long the title of “ground breaking” will really last for Star Citizen. Nothing they’re doing is particularly new, it’s just that they’re taking the initiative to do a bit of everything and mash it all together with the cherry-on-top of decent graphics due to them denying the game a console port.
If the game continues its current trend of growing while developing then by the time it actually is finished the only thing that will set it aside from other titles in whatever year it’s released is that it took the longest to develop and it was the most expensive.
I wouldn’t dismiss the Local Physics grid they made as they are (as far as I’m aware), the first devs to ever achieve such a thing. Also the true fps camera is a big one as so many games just use camera trickery. I don’t think any other studio would fund the research to solve these issues so unless RSI sell off the tech (which would be smart), then they’ll be leading for some time.