No Man’s Sky faced a huge amount of criticism from the moment it launched, mainly because the game didn’t live up to the hype that preceded it. Such was the disparity, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK received 23 complaints regarding the promotional assets used on the game’s Steam page.
As Eurogamer explains, all the complaints pointed to the screenshots and videos being misleading in terms of the graphics, combat, ship-flying, and life present on different planets. Anyone who played the game will likely agree. However, the ASA concluded today that developer Hello Games did not mislead consumers.
The saving grace for Hello Games seems to be the use of procedural generation to create the many different worlds of No Man’s Sky Because of this, the ASA decided players would not expect to see exactly what was represented in the promotional material.
In a very lengthy report, the ASA states, “The summary description of the game made clear that it was procedurally generated, that the game universe was essentially infinite, and that the core premise was exploration. As such, we considered consumers would understand the images and videos to be representative of the type of content they would encounter during gameplay, but would not generally expect to see those specific creatures, landscapes, battles and structures.”
With the complaints not being upheld and a conclusion of “no further action required” by the ASA, Hello Games can continue to use its existing promotional assets on both Steam and the PlayStation Store. Meanwhile, the small development team is hard at work trying to improve the game and rebuild trust with gamers, which it has kicked off this week by releasing a Foundation Update. Several further updates are planned in response to gamers’ feedback.
The negative response to No Man’s Sky also resulted in Valve changing its policy on Steam regarding image use. Developers must now include in-game screenshots for their game listings. No other images are allowed.
