So I get what you’re saying and that you’re frustrated, but like. Sony bought Hello Games. If they wanted to control the marketing and the message, make sure that they weren’t going to make any false promises, they could have done that.
There was apparently an interview from Sony exec Shuhei Yoshida where he talks about the marketing of No Man’s Sky and basically throws it all on Sean Murray’s shoulders- Murray didn’t have a PR strategy, what was he thinking, etc.
I’m not sure that’s really fair.
As the publisher, Sony should have been responsible for PR- and they were, sort of. They made sure that No Man’s Sky was pretty prominent at E3, that Murray (who is a programmer and idea guy by trade) got to talk about the game on the freaking Colbert Report, besides every other bit of marketing you’ve seen. I don’t think that Murray would have had those platforms without Sony’s funding, and the company was perfectly happy to hand him the microphone when he was generating hype, pre-orders, and day one purchases.
Like. I’m not about to be a character witness for the dude. But it’s not the first time we’ve seen a developer promise things that they can’t deliver on (check out Peter Molyneux’s pattern of advertising the Fable games for example), and Murray was basically the only one talking about the game. Like Yoshida said, Hello Games didn’t have a PR department. They were an indie company making an ambitious but flawed indie game that suddenly got a Triple-A platform and Triple-A expectations.
If Sony wanted to make sure that consumers were getting a fair view of No Man’s Sky, wouldn’t it have made sense to provide Hello Games a PR department? I couldn’t find a detailed contract detailing the extent of Sony’s ownership of Hello Games, but they said they put their “full weight” behind it, treating No Man’s Sky like a first-party game. But, hey, they didn’t provide a PR team, they never saw fit to vet the promises the studio made, and what do you know, the game sold a ton of copies, was panned critically, saw a public outcry, and now the small studio behind it is just fucking gone and the company that bought them is A-OK.
And the kicker for a lot of people in this whole debacle is that Sony refuses to refund people who bought No Man’s Sky digitally, despite its high profile failure.
So maybe we shouldn’t make Murray out to be totally responsible for this. He promised a lot more than he delivered, yeah, which either makes him a liar or an overly optimistic fool, but it sure looks he had plenty of people from Sony looking over his shoulder who could have called him on it but chose not to. They made money off of those early sales and Murray is now ruined as far as the games industry goes.
Maybe we should hold them a little more responsible.
yousharknotpass
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
dededos
germansingergirl
jbbartram-illu
jacobvanloon
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
dailybridgerton
