PR campaign No Man's Sky will check the British Agency for Advertising Standards

The very “release” trailer for No Man's Sky with Reddit, which fully describes the quality of the final product in just 30 seconds

In early August of this year, the first-person space travel game No Man's Sky went on sale. During the entire period of the creation of the game, the developers strongly praised their product, promised many features and capabilities. However, the final version did not meet the expectations of the players.

Instead of an exciting space adventure in a huge galaxy, gamers got an analogue of the “farm”, and the gameplay came down to gathering resources, refueling the ship and flying to the next planet, where everything was new.
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When the players realized how badly they were deceived, mass demands for a refund for the game followed at all the sites where it was distributed.

For the analysis of the contents of numerous promises and promotional materials that are not true, the British agency for advertising standards Advertising Standards Authority has already taken up. Consideration of the No Man's Sky advertising campaign started after receiving a formal complaint from the user reddit under the nickname AzzerUK. This information is confirmed by the resource Eurogamer.

The main motivation for action and a complaint to the supervisor was not razcharchovanie in the game, and not even a loss of money (AzzerUK claims that he did not request a refund on Steam after the purchase, unlike many other players), but the fact that the final product did not corresponded to the declared during the large-scale advertising campaign launched by Hello Games.

"I realized that if we want the game pages on Steam to stop misleading users, we need to contact the supervisory authorities (ASA), and not sit like everyone else and complain about Reddit," AzzerUK commented on their actions.

The essence of AzzerUK is that the first thing you see when you go to the No Man's Sky page on Steam or another store is the 2014 trailer that the developers prepared for E3:



This gives a false sense that the game will be exactly as shown in the trailer, but it is not. The developers also presented this video to players under the guise of "gameplay."

Very often, game creators try to dodge and indicate somewhere that computer graphics, which is used to create a trailer, is not a demonstration of the gameplay, while at the same time not mentioning it directly.

AzzerUK claims that it does not crave the "blood" of Hello Games. His complaint to the ASA is aimed at changing the approach to the marketing and advertising of games in general, and the situation with No Man's Sky can be a good precedent. And Hello Games were "punished" by the players themselves by abandoning their product.

Back at the end of August, online Steam player statistics on SteamDB was disappointing for No Man's Sky developers:



The peak of the launch of the game accounted for the day after the release and amounted to 212,613 people, after which the numbers kept falling.

Now, after another month, things look disastrous:



On September 1, the number of players was only about 7,500 people per day, and as early as September 26 this figure dropped below 2,000 .

For comparison: the single-player The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launches more than 10,000 over the past 24 hours, and a month and a half after the release, in mid-July 2015, about 20,000 people entered the game daily. And this is taking into account the fact that the Witcher was in no way protected from piracy and a huge part of the audience purchased the game for the PS4 and Xbox One consoles.

The total audience of the game No Man's Sky over the past two weeks amounted to only 99,000 people (provided that 773,000 copies of the game were bought on Steam) and continues to fall:



Of course, the numbers from the PS4, for which the game was also released, are not taken into account. But, as can be seen from the graphs, the PC gamers "voted" with their time for other projects, and No Man's Sky is already doomed to quiet extinction and a rare game of lovers of meditative pastime in collecting resources.

Numerous promises of the head of the studio about a multiplayer game and a unique world that have not been realized have infuriated many players much more than could have been expected.