No Man's Sky?

Was he right?

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The only thing that blew my mind was how much marketing genius the NMS crew had and how they were able to make off with literal millions.

CHAD BTFO
NMS GOAT CONFIRMED

you're like half a year too late

>marketing genius
they lied their asses off

>make a minecraft game without the building

pretty much

What marketing genius? He just never answered any questions and shifted uncomfortably in his seat with a shit eating grin on his face.

It had nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with gamers being retards. When someone doesn't tell them exactly what they are getting they just make it up and then throw a tantrum when it doesn't arrive like a spoiled brat.

>He just never answered any questions
>they just make it up and then throw a tantrum when it doesn't arrive like a spoiled brat.
he LIED over and over, then refused to address any criticism for MONTHS

Sounds like lying to your customers is the best way to sell a game these days, making them marketing genius

Now go ahead and guess why most games have sucked for the past 10 years despite selling well

You both are oversimplifying it. You need to understand how naive mainstream console gamers are.

Whenever you have a puzzle that's so easy that even your dad could figure out, mainstream gamers were the QA testing audience.

Whenever you have games that feature a big scruffy dude as the main character, mainstream gamers are the demographic.

Whenever you see DLC for content that should be in the base game, it's because mainstream gamers justify the cost somehow.

The unspoken majority are those, and they got hyped for No Man's Sky based on a trailer. HelloGames knew that they had an indie game that they could sell as a AAA title with a little bit of makeup. So they ditched development and went to the Billy Mays school of selling a product. Focus on the features, focus on what you can do with it (even if not practical or fun), only approve interviews you have control over, and only appeal to people who are already head-over-heels in love with it.

Sean Murray knew exactly what he was doing, being coy about features without outright denying them. He never said there would be multiplayer: "The chance of that is so low it will probably never happen" is basically just a very loose answer of no. He knew they couldn't program multiplayer but knew everyone wanted it.

They had the chance to make an incredibly hyped indie-game with a long-run goal set with DLC packs and patches for more features but instead went on a crash-landing path for full-price.

You just explained the marketing genius. They lied, dodged questions, and dropped vague hints to make it seem like it was full of amazing content and because of that they managed to sell over 200,000 copies at $60 each before the game was even released let alone finished.

A scam like that only works every few decades and they noticed that nobody was doing it large scale so they stepped in.

Not really marketing geniuses since they destroyed the reputation of their company they had been slowly building.

No its actually a straight line

>despite selling well
this is where you're wrong
selling >1 million copies is no longer a measure of success given the exploding marketing budgets and shareholder expectations

When you make MILLIONS of dollars with a small development team and very low cost of production who gives a shit about their future reputation? They don't need to make or sell another game again, they're set.

The low-paid developers on the team are fine too, you don't know their names and all they have to do is not put "No Man's Sky" on their resume and they're good to go job searching.

like anyone would've bought whatever they made after No Man's Sky. Their previous game almost bankrupted them and they didn't even make much money back.

I really doubt the marketing budget was that much larger than the game.

>the reputation of their company they had been slowly building.
they had one game under their belt
their company was effectively disposable anyways

>I really doubt the marketing budget was that much larger than the game.
i was speaking generally, as was the comment i replied to
obviously the budget for NMS was minuscule compared to most AAA games

Now was it a scam, or did the team just over promis what they could deliver on in time and they just didn't have the raw talent to produce anything as big as their vision was?

You don't need a good reputation when you have enough money to live the rest of your life without working

What I meant with selling well was they are making enough of a profit on the games to keep making sequels. I'm sure NMS sold enough to make a sequel but they did ruin their reputation in the process so they won't be making one

I mean, just think about it.

NMS was probably, what, a 2-3 million dollar budget after the pitch to Sony? Probably about 300k in-progress at the time. Marketing couldn't have been more than 5 million.

Even at just a 30% cut and 1m copies sold, that's still $20m in pure cash. Even after subtracting a $10m marketing and budget accomodations (which honestly I doubt were that high) that's still $10m after taxes to distribute among like 30 employees. Roughly a payout of 300k per employee before taxes.

I'm glad Sean stuck to his plan anyways, it made me realize just how shit a game like NMS would be if even if it was made a bit better, the concept was pretty fucking dumb as hell anyways. Just minecraft with better graphics.

>I really doubt the marketing budget was that much larger than the game.
from what i understand they didn't really have a marketing budget - Sony just provided opportunities for them to show it off

it was an ambitious, yet pretentious tech demo that never should have seen the light of day

>Roughly a payout of 300k per employee before taxes.
you're implying they all got an equal share
not a chance

It would be easy to make NMS much better. Make a ship you can manually upgrade and make it possible to dock smaller ships on your ship you can use to land on planets once your first ship is too large for landing. Then just make tiered planets that offer different materials so you want to keep moving forward to get better materials to upgrade your ship further. Having on-foot combat and ship combat with plenty of different weapons would help too

There's nothing about that response that gives any kind of confidence towards a quality product.

Did you know Sean Murray personally emailed Ytbers to do reviews for their first game? That's how small HelloGames was. The game was a relative success for how small the size of their company that's why they were ambitious with No Man's Sky but they couldn't pull it off so they just lied their asses off.

Fanboys also didn't help. Every trailer, interview,etc was dissected and extrapolated like every word contain a hint what features NMS will have and this was before NMS was affiliated with Sony. Sean Murray saw the hype and just went along with it.

>more grind
>better
no

Even so, a payout of even just 100k is fucking amazing, easily a house or major debt eraser for most.

Is the game in a playable state now?

demo like state.

How the fuck does a stereotypically stupid Chad manage to be better at spelling than a nerd, not to mention more articulate

user, each employee there probably made zilch compared to the company head and a couple of other lucky fuckers. The industry is fucked.

Whatever happened to Sean anyway? He just outright vanished.

I doubt any of those workers would do that crunch time with no chance of future work.

He did what a reasonable person would do after major backlash: Back the fuck up and let the fire burn out. No amount of damage control could fix this.

>since they destroyed the reputation of their company
Doubtful. Gamers in general are fucking retarded. A company name change and a couple of years laying low and most of the shitheads that got duped will have forgotten and the whole process will repeat itself.

probably moved back to his parents' ranch

Autocorrect
He's a phoneposter

>Brian Keegan
>Jordan Hindo
Going to go ahead and make the guess that for one of them English isn't their primary language.

Nerds aren't smart, just introverted. Chads aren't stupid, just extroverted.

This is the secret to understanding why Sup Forums is the way it is.

Pretty much anyone could see that there was absolutely nothing he could do to salvage things, the hate train was going at max speed. The only reasonable choice at all would be to just sever all internet persona.

Controversy aside, NMS's procedurally generated planets were actually pretty fucking diverse. Especially when you take into account how few actual assets (trees, rocks) they had. It would have been even better, had they taken the time to build a larger pool of assets to draw from.

Organizing the planets into types (toxic, desert, barren, etc) was also a mistake. They should have had a more organic system that created more of a spectrum, rather than a discrete list of types. You shouldn't land on a planet and say "this is a X planet filled with elements from list X".

The main flaw of the game, really, was the atrocious pacing. It blew its load far too quickly. The first few hours were some of the most fun I've ever had in a videogame, but there wasn't enough meat to sustain it. Combat was tedious and there was almost nothing fun to work towards. Nearly every upgrade just increased the speed at which you could reach the next upgrade.

Also If you actually believed the lies about multiplayer, you need to watch videos of Todd Howard talking about Oblivion until you learn to recognize what it looks like when a developer is talking out of his ass.

Oblivion was already such a step up from Morrowind in terms of how the NPCs went about their schedules. I still don't understand why Todd had to boast so much about Radiant AI in the first place.

Why is everybody thinking that they made so much money? Maybe the CEO did, but the rest of the employees probably just got the normal salaries and maybe a one off bonus, but if you think it's in the six digits you are retarded.

Also if you think a million dollars us enough to last you comfortably a lifetime, especially for someone in their twenties it shows you have never been outside your basement.

it wasn't a scam.

people on reddit would ask shit like
>will the game have multiplayer ?
>Let me just put it this way: the game won't not not have multiplayer.
>one million upvotes, reddit gold awarded, goty awards prefilled out to NMS

Oblivion was, in fact, shit. I don't know why the current meme is to pretend it was good. I got fooled, reinstalled and downloaded a bunch of mods. Literally spent a couple hours setting it all up and I didn't even make it out of the first dungeon before I remembered why I hated it in the first place and uninstalled.

Okay, the NPCs and they scheduling and all that was better. They may as well have been signposts in Morrowind. But fuck if I ain't still mad after all these years.

Releasing that one video of an amazing, handmade planet was scummy as fuck considering the game was procedurally generated

Well? What else are you going to show? Since it's procedurally generated, it means the player would never see it again anyways, so whats it matter?

...

>Also if you think a million dollars us enough to last you comfortably a lifetime, especially for someone in their twenties it shows you have never been outside your basement.
Because you invest. Bonds, stocks and even just a normal bank account and you can get 3% to 6% a year which is awful as an invest but 3% a year for 1 million is 30k a year.

>Also if you think a million dollars us enough to last you comfortably a lifetime

Well, my dad makes 150k a year and can sustain a family of 4 with ability to book us all on a big vacation. So they could live pretty comfortably for close to a decade at-least.

I really don't get why normies love WRPGs so much. They bore the fuck outta me, Morrowind, Planescape, and the Witcher especially.

Sure they could, but then what? Nobody is going to employ you in your mid thirties after you had 10 years of doing nothing on your resume.

What they did was the equivalent of a fat chick who uses Photoshop, lighting and angles to make herself look much more attractive on her dating profile than she really is. It was not representative of the game at all. There were not any creatures as interesting as that giant snake thing moving through the sand.

so you're literally going to do nothing but live with your million dollars in 10 years? Not going to invest or start a passion project or anything? Or even continue developing?

I would. My point is that I see a lot of people assuming that with that money they can just fuck off and do nothing.

And did you know this is an 18+ site?

oh sure, but it's not like a million in the bank wouldn't make you rest easy. You could easily work a shit-tier easy part-time job while coasting off of past money for years.

dude it's an indie game, they could split up the money however they pleased unless they agreed to give the revenue to sony in exchange for salaries

well a smart person would simply buy permanent things(a car and house that will last), invest a huge amount of the money into stocks or put it into a savings account or something, and use the rest for leisure

So what's the deal with NMS? I never played it nor did I really follow up on it's developement, but I remember a massive backlash for some reason. What happened?

I still don't get it why were people even remotely hyped for this ?? It looked like garbage the entire time, from the first trailer to release. Why was it such a surprise that it confirmed itself to be shot?

there's an entire website based around answering that question:

onemanslie.info/the-original-reddit-post/

or if you don't want to read all that, see this short video:
youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-tgaE37UE

They completely shattered all good will towards their company. Hello Games and the individuals in it will always be met with skepticism and disdain, thanks to their "genius marketing"

I played a MUD that I think did the concept better, of procedurally generated planets. Seems to be dead now though, only a couple people have been connected according to a stat page, and the homepage doesn't exist, at least not at the old address. It wasn't even an old game.

>he knew they couldnt program it
But fuckin why? It's like fuckin elder scrolls online, everyone wants elder scrolls coop not the elder scrolls fuckin mmo. They can code it, there is no reason not to put it in, there are a million god damn ways to work around it

Developers are simply lazy sacks of shit, imagine 15-20 years ago if developers had the same storage capacity and power of modern PC's now? All the cut content, all dreams of actually good companies cut short because of real constraints rather than the drivel that seems to spew from what ever perverse gland the developers stew their steaming product from now