Problems with perception (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Saturday, August 13, 2016, 14:20 (3024 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Personally, I fall into the same camp as others in that I rarely buy a game or watch a movie without learning a bit about it first.
So while I don't totally buy into the premise of your point, I do think the nature of "how something is made" is being used to unfairly market some games, movies, etc.

As I often due, I tend to place the majority of the blame on publishers and the media who often act as pawns of the publishers, but also on gamers and how we set expectations. When the first No Man's Sky trailer was released, every post on every site made a huge deal about the 4-person dev team and the procedurally generated content. And rightfully so. For gaming industry "insiders" (anyone who makes or plays games and has an interest in how they're made), the nature of No Man's Sky's development is noteworthy. The problem is that the media (and readers) often seem to confuse "noteworthy" with "HYPE". Rather than treat NMS as an interesting game worth paying attention to, it got blown into "the next big thing". Even when the media made supposed efforts to calm expectations, they did so in sensational ways. I've lost track of how many times I read phrases like "we'll have to wait and see what the gameplay loop actually entails", while the developers had already been very open about the scavaging/survival oriented gameplay loop. The media treated NMS as some sort of mystery even as the developers were clearly and plainly telling people what kind of game they were making. Even after launch, the lack of any true multiplayer component is treated like a discovery, when the devs openly told us months ago that you can't meet other players.

Finally, I think there is 1 element of No Man's Sky that is actively misleading: the price point. Let's say I'm just an average gamer who doesn't read articles and watch a bunch of preview coverage. I saw a couple trailers and thought "that looks really cool!", so I buy NMS. Videogames have a sort of built-in "expectation calibrator": selling price. Even if I know absolutely nothing about a new game, I can look at the price and get an idea of the sort of game I'm buying (in terms of size, complexity, and polish). With a $60 game, I expect a certain level of polish and production value. In this regard, No Man's Sky is very misleading. I'm not going to get into issues of value proposition or "hours of fun" or anything like that, because I don't ultimately think that stuff can or should be used to determine selling price. I've had more hours of fun with many $1 mobile games than some $60 blockbusters. To me, the real determining factor of price point is the scale of production and polish.
No Man's Sky is a massive game in terms of "theoretical content" (although the actual gameplay is mostly identical from planet to planet). But it is absolutely NOT a $60 in terms of presentation, mechanical depth, or polish.

So in that regard, I do think some of the "conflict" around the reception of NMS could have been entirely avoided. Ultimately, Sony and the gaming media did a disservice to the game.