“If the ads ain’t fake, you must liberate.”
It’s no secret that No Man’s Sky has had its fair share of controversies, but this one was the best. Back earlier this year, fans of the game started launching lawsuits against them for false advertising. Now mostly this wouldn’t be something we would talk about but for the fact that it involves No Man’s Sky, brings some intrigue to it. That’s not to say that the game isn’t horrible, in fact if you take the game for what it is, it does have some positives and it was generally favored by most especially with the most recent Foundation update.
But recently UK’s Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) which is the equivalent to the US’s FTC, has been investigating into claims that Hello Games and Steam deceived gamers with trailers, screenshots and descriptions of interactions in the game were misleading. The range of complaints were mostly about ship and animal behavior, quality of the graphics, building and the design of the interface. However, after some time the ASA found that there was no conclusive evidence to support the claims of what the complainants were listing. They went on to further explain that the gameplay shown in the footage supplied prior to the game’s launch was not substantially different than that the gamers were experiencing post launch. In two of the cases, they were not able to reproduce flying under a rock formation and large animal. The ASA stated this “we understood that the game was capable of producing graphics of much higher quality than that shown in the videos and of comparable quality with the screenshots, and considered that the images used therefore did not exaggerate the game’s performance in this regard.” They also stated that they were unable to replicate water and lighting effects from 2 screenshots but they concluded that the discrepancy was not important enough to be considered misleading.
The ASA concluded “that the overall impression of the ad was consistent with gameplay and the footage provided, both in terms of that captured by Hello Games and by third parties, and that it did not exaggerate the expected player experience of the game. We therefore concluded that the ad did not breach the Code.” However it was also noted that with a game with 18 quintillion planets; no two people will ever have the same experience. So in the end, this appears that the gamers that were trying to get their money back after spending 70+ hours playing this game have not given up but if you take No Man’s Sky for what it really is (a game about exploring the galaxy) you shouldn’t sit here and continue to blame them. Besides, it’s the end of the year and we now have better games such as Titanfall 2, Final Fantasy XV and Watchdogs 2, you can sit back and wait for the continued release to the Foundation update.
Here is the full report from the ASA here: https://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2016/11/Valve-Corporation/SHP_ADJ_351045.aspx#.WD7-CuYrJaR
