This could go either way. If the watchdog finds them guilty of fraud, that's good for gaming to be sure, but if the watchdog lets it go that will essentially give a pass to all game devs to lie their way to sales.

Letting it go would honestly be better for us.

If they nailed Hello games, the result would be that developers would simply be more vague in their marketing. That way, if no specific promises are made, there's no way to lie or mislead everyone. You only get in trouble if you make specific claims that turn out not to be true.

So they'd be vague and not really commit to telling us anything substantial.

If you know you're going to buy a game in the first week regardless, just pre order the stupid thing if you want to.

I don't know why marketing begins so early. Do you really sell more games if you advertise 18 months out vs 4? Marketing tie ins might have to be arranged sooner, but those can be done without announcing or explaining your game to the public.

It's about securing the sale as early as possible. Game preorders have been around long enough now that publishers can get a sense of what their total sales are going to be based on the number of preorders. So it helps publishers and developers with financial forecasting and stuff like that. Plus, there's the fact that if a customer decides that they want to buy a game, they are less likely to cancel a preorder than they are to just change their mind about picking it up on launch day. There's a "the money has already been spent, so I may as well get it" mentality that comes into play here. It's the same reason that I get a deposit from any customer that wants me to special order something for them. When I take a deposit, the customer will come in and pick up their order when it arrives almost every single time, with the rare cancellation. But if I order something for a customer and I don't take a deposit, the odds are closer to 70/30 in favor of them not coming in to pick it up.

This has the potential to be a significant development with regards to the entire gaming industry:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-09-28-ad-watchdog-looking-at-no-mans-sky

This line jumped out at me:

"The Reddit user who posted about the ASA's response, AzzerUK, told Eurogamer he was more interested in bringing games marketing in general back down to earth moreso than seeking retribution against No Man's Sky or Hello Games specifically."

I am all for this. We all know games change drastically over the course of development. I doubt any of us would give any developer a hard time for talking about features they are exploring or working on, and then seeing those features cut before release.

Yeah... that never happens...

The problem, as I see it, is when those features are used to sell a game, and then no mention is made of them being cut before release. I'd love to see the industry spend less time marketing games that are still 6-12 months away from release. Let devs get things into a more finalized state before releasing the big marketing campaign begins.

Absolutely agree! I was fairly shocked at Destiny's initial marketing launch. We got what? A few scene paintings, a nice video, and less than a minute of actual gameplay. And we also got a preorder button. For a game whose features were unknown. Whose gameplay was unknown. Whose size and scope was unknown. Whose story was unknown.

I would rather the marketing only start a few months out, when the game is close enough to being finished that specific features and scopes are unlikely to change. Less marketing ramp up and less development secrecy, I think and hope that's the way forward.

I don't think you're considering how marketing works. Commercials on TV aren't trying to get you to pick up your keys and get in the car and go buy that toothpaste right then and there.

The other side of this is that Bungie didn't need to sell me on Destiny because Bungie had already sold me on Bungie. Fans want information on future releases sooner than later. They aren't using that information to make a purchase decision.

I think No Man's Sky is unique, and I honestly have a little sympathy for Hello Games. I don't think they realized how their initial reveal would capture so many people's imaginations, and after that the pressure to feed the hype train was too great, and I honestly don't believe that pressure came from within Hello Games. I don't think features were hawked with the intent to deceive, but they weren't able to execute on every "feature" they mentioned by ship date.

Had No Man's Sky stayed under the radar (and perhaps been a slightly cheaper digital-only release), I think people would be blown away by it. Did they set out to make a AAA game with Collector's editions, bonuses, talk show appearances and all that jazz? I don't think so. Size is the complicating factor when it comes to categorizing it, though, and was always going to be bullet point for the game. No Man's Sky is an infinitely large small game.

I mostly agree. The vast majority of the hype was just fanboys making things up and telling other people it would be in the game. "OMG I can't wait to be a space pirate and rule star systems!" Yeah dude, that's not a thing in this game. It's not even close to a thing. "I'm gonna get all my friends and we're gonna travel together everywhere!" Well, no, you're not.

BUT they did lie about some pretty major things. Saying you could see other players if you met them, showing us plants that moved when large creatures charged past, showing us functional portals in the game... All lies. Pretty blatant ones, too. I'll buy that maybe the portals were in the game originally, but were later removed, but HG knew their E3 footage was a pre-render and they presented it as live gameplay, and they knew you couldn't see other people because there was no character model in the game, but they perpetuated that lie.

Unfortunately, the scope of the game and sheer mind-blowing size of the tech got lost beneath these few but significant actual lies and then the heaps of make-believe people put on top of it.

I think this game presents a watershed moment for video games and I think we'll see far more refined games in similarly generated worlds in the near future (2-3 years for fully realized games, I think).