He said "finding each other" but not "seeing each other" and he didn't use the word "meeting". It seems to me that he is talking about the possibility of one player reaching a place that another player has already reached. Yes, it's ambiguous, but it's not untrue. It's a shared universe in the sense that changes made by one player can be seen by another. That may imply but doesn't mean that they will be able to see each other directly.

He said "finding each other" but not "seeing each other" and he didn't use the word "meeting". It seems to me that he is talking about the possibility of one player reaching a place that another player has already reached. Yes, it's ambiguous, but it's not untrue. It's a shared universe in the sense that changes made by one player can be seen by another. That may imply but doesn't mean that they will be able to see each other directly.

Are we now really discussing which kinds of misleading customers is fine, and at which point it stops being fine?

So he was vague on purpose so nobody could later on claim "but you promised us X".... "nay, I never said you would get X, I just implied the theoretical possibility that something resembling X could happen in the game".

Doesn't really make this a better thing IMO.

Look, I am happy for all the players that found that niche game fun to play. I am happy for the company that they got a great success with no mans sky. I do feel sorry for the guys that got dissapointed by what was really way less than what was promised, even though most of their blown up expectations was them filling in the blanks left on purpose by Hello games.

But I do not think this is the right way to market your game. I do think Hello games did not just a shitty job managing expectations, they released some statements that border on misleading their future customers. They created trailers with scripted events (which they said at some point they wouldn't do), and with special builds containing stuff that was cut from the final game.

And they released an unfinished games that obviously was nowhere near ready to be released. Again, they fit into a long tradition of even big AAA studios doing that. Its still not a good thing to do.

They *have* promised in the past that players can see each other if they happen to meet, it's just very improbable. In Colbert Report, for crying out loud :)

I'd still default to the "bad PR" explanation rather than "devs lied to me" explanation, until someone shows me some malice.
That interview was a year before launch, showing a development build. The hypothetical situation of two players seeing each other was mentioned. Multiplayer was never shown, nor "promised", ever.
Perhaps a year before launch they did want to add multiplayer... which would mean he wasn't lying during that interview, and wasn't misleading or "falsely advertising" anything.

Unless you know for a fact that, at the time of this interview, they knew that MP would never be implemented, and that they decided to mention the possibility of two players seeing each other for the purpose of generating hype for a feature that they would deliberately not create... then all you've got is speculation and butthurt accusations that they've deliberately lied and misled people.
To me, this scenario does seem pretty unlikely... and the alternative -- that at this point in time, he did want players to be able to see each other -- is a much simpler explanation for that very brief mention in that year-old interview. I don't even need to crack out assume good faith here, just occams razor.

Ironically, cherry picking these kinds of statements and holding them up as "broken promises" is itself extremely dishonest. Go figure...

Honestly, I expected a bit more sympathy and understanding for what it's like to actually develop and ship an indie game over several years of full time work from this forum... and less of the Completely Ignorant Gamer™ brand slander and rage.

Are we now really discussing which kinds of misleading customers is fine, and at which point it stops being fine?

So he was vague on purpose so nobody could later on claim "but you promised us X"....

And I think that's fine. If people are asking about what's going to be in the game when the game is still being made, then he has 3 choices:

1) Make a firm commitment to a feature. This is a big risk and could end up untrue, so he would get accused of lying.
2) Refuse to answer. People then stop asking about the game and it disappears into obscurity.
3) Talk in vague terms about features they hope to deliver, while being careful not to lie about them.

The same applies to showing trailers. I agree that every effort should be made to ensure that a trailer represents the final game. But we can't expect that every single thing that appears in a trailer is going to appear exactly as-is in the final game. Half of the trailers for games these days feature footage that was never intended to be in the game at all, but people accept it as giving them a flavour of what is going to come, not a guarantee of the exact gameplay they'll experience.

In the circumstances, #3 seems fine to me.

I'm not going to comment on the trailers or the TV interviews because I haven't watched them. But whenever people post actual quotes, it seems quite clear that they're reading more into them than was ever actually said.

They *have* promised in the past that players can see each other if they happen to meet, it's just very improbable. In Colbert Report, for crying out loud :)

I'd still default to the "bad PR" explanation rather than "devs lied to me" explanation, until someone shows me some malice.
That interview was a year before launch, showing a development build. The hypothetical situation of two players seeing each other was mentioned. Multiplayer was never shown, nor "promised", ever.
Perhaps a year before launch they did want to add multiplayer... which would mean he wasn't lying during that interview, and wasn't misleading or "falsely advertising" anything.

Unless you know for a fact that, at the time of this interview, they knew that MP would never be implemented, and that they decided to mention the possibility of two players seeing each other for the purpose of generating hype for a feature that they would deliberately not create... then all you've got is speculation and butthurt accusations that they've deliberately lied and misled people.
To me, this scenario does seem pretty unlikely... and the alternative -- that at this point in time, he did want players to be able to see each other -- is a much simpler explanation for that very brief mention in that year-old interview. I don't even need to crack out assume good faith here, just occams razor.

Ironically, cherry picking these kinds of statements and holding them up as "broken promises" is itself extremely dishonest. Go figure...

Honestly, I expected a bit more sympathy and understanding for what it's like to actually develop and ship an indie game over several years of full time work from this forum... and less of the Completely Ignorant Gamer™ brand slander and rage.

I said I completely understand them stating, before launch, that a feature will be there, but in the end not making it in the final product. I said that in my very first post actually :

Don't get me wrong, I get most of it, I mean I'm sure there are lots of those features that the dev team *wanted* to add and hoped they could do so, but at some point you've got to draw a line and launch

Basically what you just said.

What I said I don't like is that they kept making misleading statements *after* the launch, like the tweet I just posted. They could have simply said "no, nope, you can't see other players, you can just see other players discoveries. Maybe in the future we'll implement seeing other players, but it's not there right now." Come on. It's not that hard to just say that, is it? After you *have* explicitly mentioned that you will include X in the game, the least you can do after launch is explicitly state that it didn't make the cut. Simple as that. I mean, really, who exactly am I supposed to ask in order to find out if the X feature *did* make the cut or not? I agree that people that rage about "lies" don't understand some of the realities of game development, but I'm not talking about that. I paid 60E, played it for a few hours(which were pretty enjoyable once the perf issues were solved), but I am *still* not sure if feature X(seeing other people) is there or not. *Should* I go looking for other players after all with my "scan for other players" device, which Sean Murray tweeted is something they "wanted to happen"? If I'll go by their last concrete statement on the matter(even if it's 1 year ago), then the feature should be there. If not, what I should go with instead? My problem isn't that they said the feature would be there and it's not, that's completely fine, my problem is that...I don't even know if the feature is there! :)

Although I'm personally not surprised, I think these angry users do have a bit of a justification for being angry, regardless of whether they over-hyped the game or not. In some way, this was to be expected, if one is realistic. I mean, planets are generated with a 64-bit seed, so there is basically an almost infinite number of planets, and the user can modify them (in fact, the entire game is more or less about atomizing mountains). A couple of million planets per day instantiated and modified... did anyone really expect a consistent universe? How would that even work? Storage, bandwidth? This is a bit naive of an expectation. Of course this wasn't going to happen (problem is, it was made seem that way). Looking at some Let's Play videos (not having played myself), it looks like a kinda nice space simulator where you can atomize the terrain with that laser tool, and otherwise basically have nothing else to do. Occasionally some drone comes along which you blast away with the same laser. Right, OK. Not my thing, but if you like space sims... why not. Pretty nice. If only there was something to do, too. Celestia is not quite so detailled when it comes to terrain and vegetation (OK, a slight understatement!), but it's been around for like 15 years, it runs on a 15 year old computer just fine, and it even simulates a correct universe with the correct looking celestial objects as we know them in the right place. You can fly around and do nothing just fine in Celestia, you can even time travel. You get all that for free. But if you look at the price for NMS, it says 60 dollars. That's... wow. For a game which feels like half-finshed and where you can basically do nothing, that's a lot. A lot of finished, polished games with a lot of unique content on Steam sell for 2/3 or 1/2 that price. Second, if you throw around words like "fleet" and "faction", then whether or not you explicitly said it or not, you are promising competitive multiplayer gameplay. What else would factions and fleets be good for? Now, the game has no such thing, players cannot even see each other, and some reviewer said his friends couldn't even see the stuff he did on planets when they visited the same places later (I'll have to take his word for that). That's not bad per se. What's bad is that it has been implicitly promised. Do you wonder that people feel cheated?

They *have* promised in the past that players can see each other if they happen to meet, it's just very improbable. In Colbert Report, for crying out loud :)

I'd still default to the "bad PR" explanation rather than "devs lied to me" explanation, until someone shows me some malice.
That interview was a year before launch, showing a development build. The hypothetical situation of two players seeing each other was mentioned. Multiplayer was never shown, nor "promised", ever.
Perhaps a year before launch they did want to add multiplayer... which would mean he wasn't lying during that interview, and wasn't misleading or "falsely advertising" anything.

Unless you know for a fact that, at the time of this interview, they knew that MP would never be implemented, and that they decided to mention the possibility of two players seeing each other for the purpose of generating hype for a feature that they would deliberately not create... then all you've got is speculation and butthurt accusations that they've deliberately lied and misled people.
To me, this scenario does seem pretty unlikely... and the alternative -- that at this point in time, he did want players to be able to see each other -- is a much simpler explanation for that very brief mention in that year-old interview. I don't even need to crack out assume good faith here, just occams razor.

Ironically, cherry picking these kinds of statements and holding them up as "broken promises" is itself extremely dishonest. Go figure...

Honestly, I expected a bit more sympathy and understanding for what it's like to actually develop and ship an indie game over several years of full time work from this forum... and less of the Completely Ignorant Gamer™ brand slander and rage.

I agree that it's really tough to ship and make a game, but like a lot of people said, they didn't do the best job managing expectations either. That's pretty much what happens when an indie game gets hyped up like nuts. You're right: not having a proper PR is pretty much the cause of this. It's sad, because it's going to discourage people from making something different.

I've heard sales are dropping off now for NMS.

Gameranx talked about it three days ago or so:

Are we now really discussing which kinds of misleading customers is fine, and at which point it stops being fine?

So he was vague on purpose so nobody could later on claim "but you promised us X"....

And I think that's fine. If people are asking about what's going to be in the game when the game is still being made, then he has 3 choices:

1) Make a firm commitment to a feature. This is a big risk and could end up untrue, so he would get accused of lying.
2) Refuse to answer. People then stop asking about the game and it disappears into obscurity.
3) Talk in vague terms about features they hope to deliver, while being careful not to lie about them.

The same applies to showing trailers. I agree that every effort should be made to ensure that a trailer represents the final game. But we can't expect that every single thing that appears in a trailer is going to appear exactly as-is in the final game. Half of the trailers for games these days feature footage that was never intended to be in the game at all, but people accept it as giving them a flavour of what is going to come, not a guarantee of the exact gameplay they'll experience.

In the circumstances, #3 seems fine to me.

I'm not going to comment on the trailers or the TV interviews because I haven't watched them. But whenever people post actual quotes, it seems quite clear that they're reading more into them than was ever actually said.

Well, point taken, but I guess there is a VERY FINE LINE you have to walk if you choose #3.

In MANY of the interviews I have seen, the interviewer asked a pretty direct question. Nothing vague about it. Many times Murrays answer simply was "Yes"... if you watched his body language closely you could have seen that he was quite uncomfortable with the situation.

But come on. What he said was "Yes" when asked "Is there multiplayer?". Not "Yes, it is planned". Not "Yes, we would like to introduce multiplayer".

How could anyone correctly interpret his sometimes quite ominous long pauses, and the nervous laughter as "I am currently not telling you the full truth"? Maybe he just had to think to make sure he understood the question correct? Maybe he is just not comfortable talking at the TV or before a huge crowd?

And don't get me started on the "Yes, kind of..." answers... sure, now that is vague. Sure, I understand he doesn't want to comit to promises until the game is out.

But as mikeman said it very well, as soon as the product is out, or even BETTER, as soon as the product is finalized (which had to happen some weeks before release), you should start to come clean with your customers about what did and did not make it into the final product. Nothing hard about saying "Sorry guys, I know we were hinting in the direction that NmS had some kind of multiplayer, but in the end it didn't make the cut. I repeat, there is no multiplayer in NMS!".

That is when being vague on purpose turned from a shady marketing strategy that might backfire into a shitty one that had to backfire.

I've heard sales are dropping off now for NMS.

That was clear from the start. The game might have kept up some momentum if just one or two things went wrong with the release. But with all that (overpromising and underdelivering, performance issues, flatout missing gameplay, not that great variety in many things, letting fanboys ride the hypetrain skyhigh), and the bad press it got as a result, it was clear that the initial spike would make up most of the sales this game will most probably ever see.

There was a lot of clear misdirection involved. At the end of the day, it's starting to be a bit more and more of an indie game that needed more time for development, unfortunately. This is why people don't usually put money on new game concepts, unfortunately. They promise the world but only deliver a farmhouse.