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?
So I was apparently one of the lucky ones. I bought cyberpunk day one, never had a single glitch. I saw all the chaos that went on and expected there to be a couple but I played through the entire game without a problem. Over the years ive played it a few more times after major updates or DLC and had fun each time.
It’s a very good game, but also very different than what we were lead to believe it would be pre launch.
Heh, I got Google Stadia’s launch bundle for CP2077, it was heavily rebated next to all other console options, ran on high end hardware, came with a controller and a Chromecast. In the end it cost me nothing because all of it was refunded when Google shuttered Stadia.
Overall, I enjoyed the game at launch. The city was dead, glitches were everywhere, Game streaming was hit and miss, but the side quests and story missions were very good. Its biggest fault was looking like GTA while being nothing like it.