Can anyone with insight into the games industry explain the financials of dedicating years to adding material to a failed title for free? How do they make enough new revenue from new customers that wouldn't otherwise pick it up to justify the cost of creating all of the new features and material?
NMS is only a failure in the sense of internet backlash. The game sold well (and afaik continues to do so) and has gotten better reception (recent steam ratings are mostly positive https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/) as new updates have been released over the years.
HN in general has weird standards around game quality considering many of the users work on software as service start-ups that launch as almost broken MVPs. I understand NMS asked players to pay $60 up front but they've put their money where there mouth is and continually supported and updated the game.
> HN in general has weird standards around game quality considering many of the users work on software as service start-ups that launch as almost broken MVPs.
Thank you so much for saying this. This community is very toxic in a few ways, and this is one of them.
The "backlash" was mostly centered around the promises made by the game creator and the demo's they showed.
It had everything to do with what promised / implied vs what was actually delivered.
If the creator had slapped a Open Beta tag on the box and charged $20 (and simply upped that number as they got closer to release), everyone would probably still be talking about it.
But instead they delivered on 25%-50% of what they claimed was in the game.
I'm not sure it was a "failed title", so much as upset a lot of people by advertising features that weren't in it at launch.
I, and most people I knew who bought the game at launch, were disappointed but also REALLY enjoyed the game. I still play casually to this day and the updates since launch have more than made up for any disappointment I originally felt, and it's currently one of my favourite games of the last few years.
It's a stunningly beautiful, peaceful, and endlessly enjoyable creative explorer. On par with Minecraft and Astroneer.
I believe, as a cursory internet search says, they had revenue of over 130 million (in 2016) as a small team with no investors. If true, they can continue to do this for the rest of their lives without any financial issues.
Pre-orders are hardly a success. The game is now doing well off of a hard-earned sales tail thanks to good will and amends. Which answers the root question: the update isn't "free" if it attracts new customers.
Outside of the other commentators mentioning revenue, I found the game to be /exceptional/. I played it maybe 1.5 years (?) after release and it was very well polished and extremely fun to play. Apparently it failed at launched but has fully recovered game play and finance-wise.
No Man's Sky is a perfect example of the old aphorism "there's no such thing as bad publicity". Sales were pretty good, I think. The game wasn't really bad at launch either, despite the complaints. It has problems but it was and still is a unique experience.
1. Massive hype suspended the critical faculties of many gamers (maybe fueled by Murray's geeky and somewhat confused countenance) and the game saw substantial pre-orders.
2. Sandbox, infinite exploration nature of the game meant massive numbers were playing after launch despite disappointment and frustration in the game. It does offer a unique experience.
3. After a period of keeping their heads down as an organization -- probably partially to try to avoid a lawsuit -- they started rolling out free updates that pushed the game forward enough to maintain interest.
The game was hugely successful, even by AAA standards. Combined with a tiny team means they could likely put out free updates for another decade.
I have a feeling they're playing the long game. Once they've unequivocally won people over with updates they'll likely use their war chest and momentum to roll out another insanely ambitious title, though they might stick to a PC release so they can manage expectations better.
The real answer is Sony will pay for timed exclusives and they want to push their VR headset. You do some market analysis and couple that with the free PR and cash of an exclusive contract. If that looks good then you go for it.
Games today are more of a services than a business due to online distribution.
You don’t go in debt by making a ton of copies that don’t sel and you don’t lose money when you lower your sale price to clear inventory because there isn’t none.
If you continue to develop and support the game you can create a continguous stream of revenue even if it’s a small one, for a small studio without investors it’s a very viable business model.
I can't wait for someone like noclip to tell the story of this game's rise and fall and rise again. They pulled this out of the ashes of one of the worst launches ever and now it's a huge success
It was a huge financial success even if it was a failure at launch. Instead of running away, they stuck around and fixed their mistakes. It just shows that money does fix everything as Mark Cuban says.
I respect the hell out of these guys. They launched to widespread criticism, and rather than giving up they’ve spent the last few years working hard to improve their game.
The criticism was there because they over promised that it would launch with a great deal of content that wasn't delivered. Why should we encourage this type of behavior since it is becoming rampant in the industry to release unfinished games at all?
I definitely agree on the over-promised features. I was severely disappointed on launch, as was just about everyone else I think. They should not have promised what they did, and they shouldn't have launched at the price they did. They definitely should've playtested and done more Q&A before launch.
Now considering that, I do think that they seem to have made the best out of the situation they were in. Hello Games seems to be a lot more open, not promising things they can't deliver, and they've been quietly bringing the game up to where they said it would be. It really seems like they're trying to make restitution and do things the right way, this time around. That says a lot to me about where they want to be in the future and what they've learned from what they did.
The content is being delivered though. And everyone who bought at launch gets everything at no additional cost. That's the kind of behavior I am happy to encourage.
Except customers were led to believe that the content / functionality would be available at launch, not years down the road. That's not a good experience.
Right... I mean, they said MULTIPLE times that it would have multiplayer. Not just an implication, but straight up saying "you could encounter other players, but the likelihood is so tiny because of the size of what we're building" and that "you can't see yourself, so the only way to know what you look like is for someone else to see you" (these are direct quotes from Sean Murray, not paraphrasing). The box even had an ESRB rating for multiplayer that was covered up with a sticker for one that didn't rate it for multiplayer, at release.
They said you could grief other players. They said you could customize the look of your player. They said you could land on comets. They said the animals eat each other. They said you wouldn't have to ever gather resources if you wanted (which I guess is technically true if you're alright with also doing absolutely nothing else the game has to offer beside walking around on your starting planet).
I guess you could argue that these were all some sort of vision of a "future state" and not representative of day 1, but there certainly weren't any qualifications added to the statement in any of his interviews, and there's plenty of evidence that they actually intended this stuff to be in on day 1 but simply didn't have the time. Which is fine! And I think we should praise them for committing to turning it into a game that is actually amazing. But they definitely did betray a lot of players at launch.
I always get annoyed when I see people repeat the quote "you could encounter other players, but the likelihood is so tiny" as though he was promising see-your-friends-multiplayer.
The context of that quote was that Sean was explaining why the game had multiplayer elements like naming rights for discoveries in a shared universe but the gameplay was primary about solo exploration. It was clear that he wanted to push the benefits of "shared universe" as a form of multiplayer but as for literally seeing your friends, he was trying to say "we could code it into the game but we think it's too unlikely so we won't".
It's obvious that Murray has problems directly saying no. He repeatedly said "rare", meaning "never". That was his crime.
Is "See your friends" not what he actually promised?[1] Rare certainly doesn't mean never. In another interview, he said players running into each other will be rare but will be less rare if more players buy the game, which doesn't make since if the probability of this happening is always 0.
Even after the game came out he kept up the charade. When two players on the same planet couldn't see each other he made evasive comments about server load[2].
You can spin it however you want in your head, but the evidence is overwhelming: they intended this game to be a true multiplayer experience very early in development. They intended to have it done by release.
As the release cycle went on and Sean did more interviews, it became subtly clear that he was trying to control expectations, by saying things like "we want it to be an experience like Dark Souls or Journey", which implies a sort of "humans are here but you never see them" atmosphere (moreso Dark Souls than Journey). But that didn't stop other comments from him, like clearly saying that other players would be able to see your character, nor did it stop the box from being printed with an Online Play ESRB rating before being redacted with a rating that didn't have that.
In the best case, I'm fine with believing the best of everyone involved; that this was Hello Games' first game, that Sean firmly believed they could get everything done by release, and then, as it always does, the reality of software development hits. I think that's very likely what happened. So calling their actions "lies" is very strong language; moreso simply broken promises. But, at the same time: we can't simply allow game developers to promise the universe and then not hold them accountable when they can't deliver, because that line between "assume the best, they're new at this" and "trying to drive pre-order sales despite knowing the game is shit" is very gray, and very hard to identify when all the information we often have to go on is their word.
It may be unpopular because it's just not true. They did a demo showing procedurally generated terrain and animals that (later we learned) it was NOT procedurally generated at all.
So yeah, they promised stuff that they knew they wouldn't deliver.
Jimquisition does a good video on the promises and vagueness of Hello Games prior and after release [1], so I would have to disagree. The link provides video footage of Sean Murray stating things. I'm happy with what it's become, but I also recognize what it was.
Maybe not literally (I think that it actually did happen more than once that they outright said something was going to be in the game and it didn’t happen), but there was a whole lot of “we implied this, some rampant speculation started, and we made no effort to quash the rumors because they help drive the hype machine”.
I think it was less on purpose and more symptomatic of having a breathless dreamer as a lead who thinks the world is possible. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but might be a good idea to keep that guy’s interactions with the press pretty rehearsed so you don’t accidentally put your foot in your mouth. The guy who did the Fable franchise (Peter Molyneux) was also notoriously bad about this.
Except Peter's most recent failure, Godus, never got finished and had work stopped on it pretty quickly. I have much less of a problem with breathless dreamers who keep working and find ways to make their dream reality rather than moving on to something else and abandoning their supporters when they get bored.
> they outright said something was going to be in the game and it didn’t happen
Haven't most if not all of those NMS promises been fulfilled?
As someone who played a fair amount NMS and Godus, even at launch NMS was a much better and more interesting game than Godus and it has only improved.
The funny part is, when you ask people to back this up, they can't. I never found anyone that could point to these explicit promises. There was lots of discussion about things they'd like to add, or just talking about game development in general, but I don't remember them saying "At launch, you will get X feature" and then at launch, not having that.
There are others like this, it was just the first result on Google.
I think comments like yours really just short-change Hello Games for the sheer amount of progress they've made and the difficulty of the challenge they faced in doing something as hard as winning back the gaming community.
For example, literally the first thing in the list you link:
"Yeah, at the moment you can land on asteroids."
That's a "promise" apparently not kept.
So is this:
"Maybe you take out a space station, or a fleet, or you know, something like that..."
I'm not going to list everything here, but everything everyone complains about is what they were shown, what they hyped themselves, and general game development that will get changed.
I never found anyone that could point to these explicit promises. There was lots of discussion about things they'd like to add, or just talking about game development in general, but I don't remember them saying "At launch, you will get X feature" and then at launch, not having that.
Edit: You edited your comment after I replied. It was originally just a link with no commentary.
> There are others like this, it was just the first result on Google.
You would do well to not just assume it's 100% accurate.
> I think comments like yours really just short-change Hello Games for the sheer amount of progress they've made and the difficulty of the challenge they faced in doing something as hard as winning back the gaming community.
First, I'm not saying that they game was perfect. Only that the issue was the hype built up by the community and the inference of "promises" where there were none. The game needed work, and they did a great job in improving it.
Secondly, the gaming community is fickle and uncaring. They love things they claim to hate, and hate things they claim to love. Sure, Hello Games has done a lot, and they get a lot of credit for this especially in the face of the death threats from that gaming community. Sorry, but the gaming community does not have my sympathy.
I think both of our comments help describe the sum of what happened. For example, that "rapid fire interview" frequently cited in the reddit thread I posted happened two years(!) before NMS was released. It's not Hello Games' fault that it was so heavily-circulated two years later, long after those answers had changed. But I also would assert that Hello Games avoided the sort of explicit clarifications that would've diffused the bomb, and it was easy to interpret this as bad faith.
We can definitely agree that the gaming community does tend to overreact. Especially the modern gaming community with its hyper-fixation and echo chambers and far-reaching mainstream audiences. You don't just get lynched by a few nerds across a few phpbb forums anymore.
Hello Games struck hype gold at the expense of the deep dive scrutiny that gamers love, and I would largely credit the veil of mystery that they continued to sew right up to August 2016.
IIRC they got in trouble for not being forthcoming about basic questions about the game close to launch.
However, we as humanity really need to give people the opportunity to make things right. And Hello Games surely did that by implementing just about everything they said they would including multiplayer over the next few years.
If a drunk driver hits somebody, I'm not going to admire them for pulling over and doing all they can to help. Yes, it's the right thing to do - but they wouldn't be in that situation if not for their own harmful behavior to begin with.
It's more like someone who says they will drive you somewhere but when you get in the car with them they reveal that they can't drive, but they are going to learn over the next few months and they will definitely drive you were they originally promised just as soon as they've done that.
I agree with you that free add-ons to games are great but they shouldn't just be the originally promised functionality
It's more like someone says they'll drive you somewhere, but when you get in the car you can't see them in the driver seat but they say it's just a bug in the car due to heavy server load. Then 3 years later they reveal they show up and get in the car.
This game keeps getting better. Sean and his team are the best example of focusing on what matters in the face of backlash even if earned or not. True grit.
In comparison, Stardew Valley, a small indy game, also released in 2016 has 4x as many playing but had almost no marketing budget, didn't appear on national television in interviews and certainly didn't get the same hype, but did deliver what he promised and delivered a rock solid game at launch.
