Maybe it will reduce the amount of refunds but it’s a dumb way to handle it in terms of customer service. A much better way would be this “Yes sure we can process your refund but if you decide to keep NMS we can offer you 3 months of Free PlayStation Plus, or a voucher for $20 credit on the PSN store.” In the end that would probably cost them less and create much less bad publicity.
If you read the whole article you’ll see that Sony have said this is not true and that you can buy it again. Seems like a disconnect between their customer service staff and the higher-ups.
We’ve hit the 2 week mark on PC. Yesterday’s peak was 19055. Which gives us a loss of 91.13% of the peak player base in that time.
It’s also dropped out of the top 20 games on steam. Currently behind Terraria.
It’s understandable, though. How could you possibly compete with a procedurally generated survival/exploration game made by like 8 guys that’s 5 years old without the full force of sony’s marketing budget? hmm…
Of course, it’s already sold a ton of copies, more than enough to justify the marketing spend. Not everyone will be getting refunds, and for many it’ll just be another game that they’ve bought that they never get much playtime out of.
Oh sure, it’s a wild success for no reason except that a lot of people decided to commit $60 to a game blind rather than simply wait a few hours. And no one will learn their lesson.
But it’ll go down in history as one of the all time disappointments and a cautionary tale, the sort of thing that makes the top of lists on gaming sites in a decade.
I bet it doesn’t. I’m remembering World of Warcraft, which was all but unplayable on release, and has similarly berated everywhere as not being what was advertised. It seems to have done well for itself in the long run.
I’m seeing an awful lot of online criticism for the game that appears to come from folks not actually playing it: in particular, a lot of comments about the game not having various things (rich worlds of lifeform variety, space combats, ship variety) that it actually does have–they’re just not available until you’ve passed some technology bars (particularly the various hyperdrive types) and moved closer to the center of the galaxy. At about 25 hours in, the game is very different than it was when I started.
It sort of matters what Hello Games does from here. If they continue to add content (atypically, maybe more early game content), I suspect that word of mouth will start bringing the players back around over the next months, and the game may have years of life left. If they write it off, it’ll end up in the dustheap.
A lot of the most detailed criticisms actually come from people who’ve played the game extensively. Like this and this.
Your idea that it’s people who don’t have the game are the ones that are critical is clearly disproven - if most people who had the game were having fun with it, it wouldn’t have fallen off a cliff and lost 92% of its players in two weeks.
As for World of Warcraft, I honestly have no idea what you’re referring to. I was actually there, on day one, with that game. And everyone was thrilled with it. The servers were so packed that Blizzard had to spend a ridiculous amount of money renting out tons of server providers on day one because they had several million more people playing than anticipated. And the game worked fine and delivered what was promised. I don’t know what backlash you’re referring to.
And WoW grew and grew - people were hooked on the game and played it for years obsessively. That’s exactly the opposite of something like NMS, where we’ve lost 92% of the peak player base. It seems like the worst comparison to pick.
But no, I’m thinking more like Spore, which was always topping “most disappointing games” or “most overhyped games” list for a decade. I think NMS will be notorious down the road in the same way that Spore is now.
Woops, my second post goes to a link where the content was deleted. Mirrored here.
I agree with SenorBeef about WoW. It was terrific and a huge success from the get-go, only gaining players, never losing them until many years after initial release.
“Baby’s First Elite Dangerous” (Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation fuckin’ brilliant review of No Man’s Sky.)
ETA: This game’s failure to reach expectations or, you know, provide compelling gameplay, seems to me to have surpassed Spore by miles. Spore at least had that really fun creature-editor that you could use to make your own beasties to share and populate in other people’s universes.
In my universe, attempting to log in produced “queues” that lasted for hours; getting logged in would often crash you back out within a minute or two, places where more than a couple hundred people gathered would stop responding or monster groups would “teleport in”, and you never really knew whether you’d be able to loot something or not. Usually you’d “kneel” to pick something up and freeze for minutes at a time. Most of this stuff took weeks of patching to make work. It was being berated non-stop in the newsgroups and their own forums.
The fact that you can’t remember this, I think, proves my point: if NMS can make the game meet more people’s expectations soon, nobody will care about the first weeks.
And if not? What do I care? I’m enjoying the game. If someone had told me exactly what I was getting, I’d have paid $60 for it. And they pretty much did, so I did.
You are missing the point. All the problems WoW suffered at launch were due entirely to its massive success and overwhelming popularity. It far exceeded anyone’s expectations.
If it takes 25 hours for a game to start getting interesting, then the game is a failure. And it’s not like there’s some interesting things at first, and then new interesting things open up as the game progresses: The things you list are what was advertised as the very core and essence of the game.
But there’s an important point you’re missing. WoW never saw its average of online player numbers drop, at all, for a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time. On the contrary, it gained and gained, for months and years. The support was beyond what they had expected, so they didn’t have sufficient servers. That was their worst problem. Big deal.
And you’re wrong that there was a huge outcry that said it wasn’t what Blizzard said it would be. That never happened.
What’s happening with NMS is like Spore, to a possibly more extreme degree. Consensus is that NMS is substantially disappointing at best, slightly warm poo at worst.
I agree that there are similarities (both games were disappointments), but I remember the hype for Spore being way bigger - even without normalizing for social media being a smaller presence back then.
That could be.
Too early to say that yet or not. It will undoubtably get another marketing push when PlayStation VR comes out and hopefully will have extra content features by then. But yes if they leave it in the current state and add no new features I agree with you.
And as has been pointed out, large parts of that list are in the game. It was just that the guy that wrote it hadn’t seen them yet.
Not that I am saying that they didn’t deliver some stuff they said they would. It is obvious that they failed with some things, but that list is wildly inaccurate, which is probably why it was deleted in the first place.
SenorBeef, you are coming across like the anti-Fan Boy that is written about these days. Those that seem to have a weird interest in seeing something fail. Frankly, as people are saying these days, anti-Fan Boys, who are as blind to something’s successes as Fan Boys are to something’s failures, are just as damaging and tiresome.
Seriously. You don’t like the game but have a weird obsession with keeping us updated regarding how many people are playing it on Steam. Why? Just, why?
ETA:
By the way, I preordered. I got the preorder bonus and everything. But I bought it in a shop across the road from work and so didn’t pay for it until I picked it up in the shop. Not all preorders involve putting money down without a chance to read reviews or see player feedback, like you seem to think.
The hype for Spore was definitely bigger, if only by virtue of lasting longer.
Regarding WoW, I think a better comparison is with Diablo 3. Diablo 3 started well but had a serious drop off due to frustrations with loot drops and the Real Money Auction House. However, with 2.0 they turned it around and is a much better game today.
I think a more accurate comparison could be with SimCity, which launched in a torrent of hype, made a bunch of promises it didn’t keep, tripped on its ass at launched day and never got up again, and now noone plays it.