No Mans Sky: When you actually listen to your fanbase
No Man’s Sky is an open-world, action-adventure survival game set in space. Released in 2016 by Hello Games, it’s a mixture of Minecraft and Star Trek in space as you are dropped in space and left to explore, build, mine, and converse your way across the galaxy, not to mention there’s an intriguing storyline. And it’s available on tons of platforms, including PS4, PC, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, macOS, Nintendo Switch, and soon iPadOS. And it’s multiplayer and cross-platform playable. And for anyone playing on Playstation or PC, you get the option of playing on your VR headset.
Pretty cool, huh? Well, it didn’t start that way. Let’s start from the beginning to provide context.
No Man’s Sky was conceived by Sean Murray, the founder of Hello Games, a British game developer based in Surrey. Murray had been a developer at Electronic Arts prior and had grown tired of developing repeated sequels, and decided to leave to form his studio to make a game he always wanted to make. The studio started with making the game “Joe Danger” which gave the studio a franchise and started their reputation as an indie game company.
Murray conceived a game about the spirit of exploration that harkened back to the optimistic science fiction of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein, as well as recreating the feelings of space exploration seen in older games like Elite, Star Control 2, and Freespace. Given the working title of “Project Skyscraper” the game was announced at the VGX awards in 2013, where it garnered significant attention, especially from Sony, who offered to provide development funding but Hello Games just wanted financial assistance for promotion and publication. Sony then presented the game at E3 in 2014 for them; until that point, no independently developed game had been demonstrated during these centre-stage events. At their press conference, Sony expected the game to be released in June 2016, however, this would not come to be as Murray felt like the game needed to be polished and thus delayed the release to August to make the necessary adjustments. They met the release date and the game was released. Smooth, right?
Wrong.
Two weeks before release, a Reddit user got a leaked copy of the game from eBay and started posting videos of their experiences in the game. Soon after, other users claimed to have leaked copies and started to post their experiences with the game. The negative elements that would be made more evident upon release started to make themselves known here as they cited frequent crashes and a much shorter time to "complete" the game by reaching the centre of the virtual galaxy than Hello Games had claimed. In response, Murray asked people waiting for the game to avoid these spoilers.
From there, things started to spiral. Retailers broke the street date and gaming journalists started posting their playthroughs early. In response to that, Sony requested sites to take down videos from early copies and Hello Games reset the servers to give players a clean slate for release. And the review copies came late, which drew concerns from others as it was a sign that Sony was concerned that the game would not live up to expectations.
And then, we get to the release date.
When the game finally came out in August 2016 as planned, it got mixed to average reviews. While the technical aspects of the game were praised, people found the game to be repetitive and monotonous, with the survival aspect of the game being tedious, as well as massive bugs and glitches, including an inability to even start the game. Not to mention that features that were promised weren’t present, causing it to gain more negative reviews and for some to even call the game false advertising, making it into a laughing stock of the industry. Post-release, it didn’t die down.
Murray even got numerous death and bomb threats post-release, making it so bad that he had to be in constant contact with the police, Hello Games’ Twitter account was hacked to post the message "No Man's Sky was a mistake" before the company regained control, refunds were piling up galore, some even outside of the time allowances, and they even got investigated for their false advertising, though they didn’t find anything incriminating.
Sean’s response? He still kept working on the game, trying to improve it. Thankfully, things would soon start to pay off for him.
In November 2016, a couple of months after the release date, Hello Games announced it was planning on bringing a large update, known as the "Foundation" Update, to the game, hoping to add in some of the features promised on launch as well as deliver some patches that would fix the game. The update was positively reviewed upon release, with players citing that it was helping to push the game in the right direction. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Subsequent updates then started to follow, adding in more features that were promised upon release and fixing the bugs. Within two years, the game managed to not only fix the bugs and gain all of the features promised on launch but in an astonishing turnaround, the game now has even more features than originally promised. The reviews also gradually got even more positive and the praise started to come, to the point where it even won Best Ongoing Game in 2020.
The tale of No Man’s Sky is a very good example of why listening to your fanbase is a very important lesson to learn not just in the video game industry but also in the entertainment industry in general. And in an age where some creatives slam the fanbase for rejecting their projects (Elizabeth Banks with the Charlie’s Angels reboot), this is a refreshing approach to criticism that many creatives should adopt. I mean, look at the people behind Sonic the Hedgehog and how they responded to the infamous Ugly Sonic design from the first trailer. And look how fixing it for the second trailer got people interested again.
Take notes, future creatives.
