The couple of guys who actually made this game might end up stigmatized by it, but they’re not the only, or probably even primary, ones to blame. Because the next time, it won’t be them again: Sony or some other big publisher will latch onto some other indie developer, and hype their game into the stratosphere, and push them to release before it’s ready, for too high a price, and people will probably go out and pre-order that game, too. That’s the sort of repeat performance folks like SenorBeef are trying to avoid.
I, for one, am grateful to threads like this, and to the attention being called to these issues. I was on board the hype train, ready to dive in on day one. In fact, I’m fairly glad the PC release was delayed a few days, as I got to find out what a massive turd this turned out to be. I have limited game-purchasing dollars, and if I had blown that on something that turned out to be a mile wide (kajillions of planets and life forms!) and an inch deep (they are all essentially the same!), despite what was promised, I would have been livid.
I also find the player base statistics to be interesting, almost a population study. We are getting raw numbers, that we can combine with the general feelings of anger about marketing deception prevalent on the web, and see the actual impact of a failed game release play out in real time.
I know that there are those who are enjoying it, but do you honestly think that this dropoff in players is just the result of anti-hype on the internet? If that was the case, Nickelback would be relegated to the dumpster for all of the internet-hate they get, but it hasn’t stopped them from selling 50-million+ records. Instead, in the real world, there is something FUNDAMENTALLY wrong with the game that is causing MOST of the players to drop it like a hot potato.
Are there specific steps that might plausibly lead to this not happening again?
As I see it, there’s a risk-reward system in place that’s pretty self-regulating. Some folks are willing to take the risk to buy a game based on pre-release buzz. They’re going to pay a lot of money, take a big risk; their reward is that they get to play a game as soon as it’s released, and sometimes they get to be part of a super-exciting conversation among those early adopters.
Other folks, like me, rarely buy a game until it’s been out for a few months (or even several years). We get to buy games for cheap, and we get to screen games based on reviews from professionals and from Dopers. In exchange, we give up the ability to join in that exciting new-game conversation; by the time I’m talking about a game, most folks have moved on past it.
I don’t expect we’ll ever reach the point where we’re past games being overhyped.
I also find it interesting to talk about. If one poster in this thread had said “gee that turned out to be a flop, it’s disappointing to see the hype machine working like this”, I’d probably agree with him and move on, but thats not how he goes about it, he’s obnoxious.
I don’t see any risk/reward. If you pre-order and don’t like it, you return the game for a refund, no risk.
What’s the point of pre-order these days? I could see if the game were only available on disc and your local game store might sell out, but if you can dl the game, why pre-order?
That’s pretty much exactly what I’ve done. I’ve said that this game was a product of hype delivering preorders and then failing to deliver on the promises. I’m not getting personal with people. I’m not saying “you’re an idiot because you like this game” - but I am arguing against things I perceive to be simply incorrect like “oh we got everything we were promised, so there’s nothing to be disappointed about”
What I did notice is that while the majority of people thought the game was crap and stopped playing it, a core group seemed to be so invested in their hype that they actually sort of doubled down and become cult-like. There’s more of that on the NMS subreddit and other forums than here, but there is some of that here - for example, your insistence that making sure you don’t expose yourself to anything about the game - no reviews, no word of mouth, no footage - just throw your money in and go in blind, that’s the best way - seems to me like rather than admitting it’s a poor decision to throw $60 at an overpromised game from a company with no track record but rather than admit that, you’ve decided to double down and say that’s the best way to try to experience something. It’s pretty bizarre.
There’s also an issue where people don’t think “this is a product I like”, but rather “I’m the sort of person who likes this product” - it’s not specific to this game, it’s the weird tendency of people to become over-identified with their preferences. So people take criticism of something personally, because they’re not taking it as criticism of the product, but criticism of their identity.
I honestly would’ve preferred this game to be 80% as good as it could be, to deliver on most of its promises - or hell, even exceed them, because it’s a game I would’ve liked to have played. But the marketing and hype for this game was way out of control. People got insanely overhyped for an overly ambitious game with a small team with absolutely no track record which is hard to believe could’ve delivered on it. As a $60 AAA game, it somehow outsold the vast majority of games that ever come out - day one sales in the millions - entirely based on people getting overhyped and commiting their money before they saw if it was actually good.
So if it was going to fail, I want it to fail catastrophically. I want to put an end towards publishers thinking a marketing push, hype, a review embargo, and an assload of day one sales can make failures profitable. I want to stop consumers from rewarding that sort of behavior. I want them to start caring if the games they make are good or are ready for release. So if this game is an utter catastrophic failure - which it is, undoubtedly, even if you personally manage to like it - that has the highest chance of making people step back and ask themselves if they really want to do this same thing next time. The bigger and more stark the failure, the more likely this is to occur.
Does Hamlet know he’s up? I want to say we may have to shrink to an 8 hour rule for the rest of the draft, but that’s rough if the picks happen to line up between like midnight and 8am, a plausible time for someone to be sleeping the whole way. But we are really dragging ass and no one is sending pre-picks to Varlos.
I think it’s a combination of points one and two, personally. Gamers as a group are legendary for being irrational and picky (crossing over to entitled in many instances) and while we like to say “No, that’s just an unpleasant stereotype” we all know it’s one with a pretty solid basis in reality.
However, the contents of the game aren’t completely what was alluded to either, so people being disappointed in the game isn’t an unreasonable response - but having actually played the game, I can say it’s not terrible, it’s a perfectly decent game and really isn’t hugely different in many respects to most of the other open-world survival games on the market at the moment.
This was addressed earlier in the thread.
I haven’t said other people should do that. All I’ve said is that I knew I was buying the game because I liked the concept, so I put the order in for it. I read a little of the hype but I don’t really like reading marketing hype so I generally stayed clear. I don’t watch videos of people playing games because it is dead boring and doesn’t tell me anything about whether I would like the game, it also takes away from the experience of playing a good game for the first time. If I was to read/watch a review it would have been the Zero Punctuation one, and I don’t think that would have stopped me from buying it, Yahtzee was quite fair on the game.
I read reviews when I have limited funds and am choosing between a number of games, in this case my funds were not limited and I could afford to buy on a whim.
I don’t see how it is a poor decision to put $60 into an over promised game when, as you have gleefully pointed out, you can always get a refund if you don’t like it. There’s no risk in pre-ordering a game. If anything, massive pre-ordering and day one sales followed by massive refunds is better for your cause than if people were more cautious and didn’t buy until someone has told them it was ok to. In that scenario a bad game will go largely unnoticed and the developers will probably blame it on poor marketing rather than people just not liking it.
Finally, I don’t actually dislike the game, so I certainly don’t feel like my money was wasted anymore than when I have bought any other game.
But it won’t do that so why get so worked up about it?
I think your opinions on marketing and hype are largely valid, but the way you are so strident about it grates. You need to gain some perspective. It is just a game.
Let the record show, when I say I don’t appreciate it when folks get personal, these two quotes exemplify what I’m trying to get at.
Criticisms of the game and of the PR machine are interesting. Praise for the game, and even for the PR machine, are interesting. Talking about how certain people are obnoxious, or how certain people are cult-like? Not so interesting.
Fair enough, it should have been saved for a separate discussion. I’m sorry for contributing to the personal tone of the thread.
There’s a big middle ground, there: You can also pick it up two or three days after release, and get to take part in most of that early experience, while also having the opportunity to read the reviews (at least, the professional ones) to base your decision on. And yes, this does depend on there being a handful of people who really do buy it on zero day, zero hour (or possibly even earlier, if the publisher allows it, which they should) in order to write the reviews, but that’s only a handful.
Definitely a continuum. I’m not on the far end of the continuum, with people who play only abandonware. I’ll once in a long while buy a game at full retail price (I like Starcraft enough that I paid full price for SC II). But I’m pretty far toward that end. If others feel burned by stuff like No Man’s Sky, sure, they can try petitions or whatever. I humbly suggest that they consider scooching a bit toward my end of the spectrum :).
Or then there’s someone like me, who doesn’t give much regard to age at all, but ends up mostly playing older stuff just because there’s more of it. If I have reason to believe I’ll like a game (usually because it’s a sequel of a game I liked), I’ll buy it early (off the top of my head, this happened with Starcraft II and its expansions, Diablo III and expansion, and Portal 2), but I’ll also buy ancient games that I finally get around to, and most games that I buy, there’s a good chance that I’ll still pick them up occasionally 5 or 10 or 20 years down the road.
We hit the one month mark with a peak of 3701 players for a retention of 1.7% of the peak player base after a month.
Aw. I was hoping for development news but all I get is more “doom” from the town crier.
Commander, the *Elyssia *is calling you.
So is Curie. 
I can’t remember the story this is from, but the town crier yelling DOOM was falsely anticipating something, right? What I’ve been saying isn’t a prediction, it’s a note of how the disaster already happened. It’s more like the town crier yelling “it’s all in ruins!”
I hope you do get some game improvements, but I wouldn’t be terribly hopeful. Saw this today. A game where social media was used extensively to hype it and communicate with the community has gone totally silent, which doesn’t bode well for their intentions to stay with the game and improveme it, or else you’d expect them to be talking about that. There have been a few patches released largely without notes that just say “bug fixes”.
You would expect them to be very proactive to hype up the additional material they’re working on, but it’s pretty much just silence. My guess is that they think it’s unfixable or not worth the time and they’re going to take the money and run.
(2678 is today’s number)