No Man's Sky: 10 More Games That Should Be Investigated For False Advertising
Hello Games' intergalactic flub is the straw that broke the camel's back.
On the 28th of September, 2016, the UK Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) launched an investigation over false advertising into the marketing of No Man's Sky, coming just after Sony's own Shuhei Yoshida threw the game and its developer directly under the bus.
Shuhei stated that No Man's Sky didn't have "a great PR strategy", that director Sean Murray "didn't have a PR person helping him" and that "in the end, he is an indie developer" - as though there's some negative connotation that comes with that statement, despite Sony making a big push for indie games at every major press event.
Yoshida's comments are a direct contradiction of that from Fergal Gara, Sony's UK Marketing Manager, who in 2015 said "We are not going to treat [No Man's Sky] any differently [...] it will be treated like a first-party release; it is not a self-published small indie title on the platform."
So which is it? Either Sony hyped up the game and didn't supply the tiny 13 person team with any publisher oversight, or they were completely hands off, and didn't know the specifics of what they were supporting until it was out in the wild.
Either way, Sony are just as much at fault as Hello Games, and the reception to No Man's Sky proves one thing: Consumers are at breaking point when it comes to how video games are shown, sold and delivered.
Thing is, the industry has gotten away with this for years, and you need only take a step back to realise No Man's Sky is only the most recent and somewhat egregious example of a practice that simply needs to stop.
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10. Batman: Arkham Knight
The Lie: That the titular main villain was a "brand new character". Rocksteady repeatedly touted the fact that the Arkham Knight's identity would be something original, with a choice quote from Rocksteady's Dax Ginn only amplifying that excitement, stating that “[designing a new character] is not an opportunity that comes along very often, and I think we totally nailed it with this guy.”
The Reality: Whether the identity of the AK was swapped at some point in development or not, the Knight was not by any means an original creation.
Instead, he was the most obvious go-to and theorised character for the role, Jason Todd. Not only that, but following months of Rocksteady stating that Mark Hamill wasn't returning to voice the Joker, and that the character was "definitely dead", he popped up as a vision inside Bats' mind, appearing in literally every major scene and in between missions.
You can argue these things are in service of pleasing the fans (in Joker's case, anyway) but for the AK's character, we literally had team members saying "He's an original creation", only for that to categorically not be the case.