This might be unpopular, but it feels like the “redemption” story around No Man’s Sky has become more of a cultural comfort narrative than an honest look at what happened.
Let’s be real — most of those updates were just delivering delayed promises, not generosity. The game we were originally sold was missing a lot of advertised features, and Hello Games never actually apologized for lying. On top of that, every update brings more bugs and half-fixed systems, and the community acts like free beta testers for Light No Fire, while still framing it all as “passion” and “commitment.”
It’s like Hello Games built a shoddy, unfinished building, declared it open anyway, and then decided to use it as a testing ground for their next building — and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.
So why do people keep buying into this narrative? Because it’s a comfortable story? Or is it somekind of parasocial relationship going on there?
NMS made 78 million in 2016, this can’t be compared to a failed AAA game or indies where devs walk away from financial failure, another emotional argument?
According to the number of upvotes, it seems that their angst is a reflection of the game industry in general. Hello Games had indeed performed to expectations by not walking away, but does that warrant mythologising the redemption arc? Even when the state of the game is buggy?
Because most other game developers would have crapped out the initial project and moved on.
Indeed. And even delayed fulfillment of the original promises is impressive given how vast the scope of the original pitch was. I’m just happy to have it, even if it took a couple years longer than expected to get.
Take a look at Star Citizen if you want to know the alternative, OP
Bringing Star Citizen up is a race to the bottom.
I think they are saying “look at star citizen as the alternative” meaning never finished, but by comparison No Man’s Sky is complete now?
Maybe i’m reading it wrong though.
Star citizen is about to cross into a billion dollars in development “costs”. It might genuinely be one of the biggest scams in history.
Anthem in some ways is a better example because Start Citizen is never going to release, they can cruise on their promises until the company goes bankrupt. Anthem however was released in an unfinished state hardly reaching the hype it generated and then EA just cut their losses and left it like that.
Remember that HG made £40 million in 2022 from good people like you, of course, they are going to keep at it.
https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2016/09/30/august-2016-digital-sales-report-no-mans-sky-generated-78-million/
Remember that at that point the game was allready 8 years old had had several large updates. Not counting few spikes from the updates first four years the game had under 2000 player/month in steam. Financially looking the pragmatic choice would have been to stop the development, but they did not.
There has been several games from big publishers that were abandoned shortly after release, even if it still was possible to fix the game. Battleborn, Anthem, Concord. And even more games that are still in theory playable, but are just full if bugs or not fun to play.
But so far i can think only three games that had bad start, but devs kept working on it and eventually managed to make fun games. No mans sky, Fallout 76 and Cyperpunk 2077
Yes, I have already said this is commendable…in the gaming industry, but not in other industries in terms of project delivery, hence the building analogy in my post.
Why would you force other industry term on the gaming industry? Thats just silly. It like saying apple is a bad fruit because it makes for a lousy boat.
Gaming is pretty unique platform in a way where the product is measured by unquantifiable metric called fun, but you want to compare it in standards of other products.
In the end they kept working on a bad product where others would have stopped and ended making it good.
Ain’t that the absurdity? It is a silly analogy, and they are asymmetrical; if the same action applies, would it have a different reaction in the other place? Would Hello Games have the reputation as they have now?
“Why would you force other industry terms on the gaming industry?” Judging from the reply here…well, you tell me…
He didn’t say he bought it. He was explaining the very obvious answer to your very obvious question. Why get all weirdly accusatory and righteous?
Why so sensitive? What’s the accusation? All I pointed out was that HG made a lot of money from people over the years; it makes a lot of sense that they did not abandon the project.
You (possibly falsely) accused a commenter of supporting HG while saying it’s a stupid thing you do. You were a dick. I pointed it out.
And that’s the whole story my friend.
You can support HG, but that doesn’t mean that others have no right to think that it is not a smart thing to do. Spare me your ad hominem tactic, please.
I will try one more time to get the point across.
I’m not calling you a jerk because I’m insulting you ad hominem and think HG is good. I’m calling you a jerk because you were a jerk. And I agree with you that HG is not good.
Ad hominem would be if I disagreed with you.