Hello Games is now working on a game as big as No Man’s Sky was for them.

No Man’s Sky’s pre-release marketing had Sean Murray promise – and in some aspects, lie – about the game, which then wasn’t as promised when it launched. However, Sean and his team did not give up, and they continued to update it for free, and since then, they have convinced the players. Perhaps this is what motivated him to tell Polygon to say their next game will be just as big and ambitious as No Man’s Sky was.

„There is this poison chalice or deal with the devil that I think any indie game developer would find a very difficult choice, right? The choice that we had with No Man’s Sky, where if I was to go back again, I would find it very difficult to know what the right path was. Where you will have an incredible interest in your game, you will have a huge amount of excitement for it. But you will be in a rocket ship, launching towards the sun, and you will be building that rocket on the way up. And there is an excitement and a craziness to that. Where we’ve ended up with the game, where we have hundreds of millions of hours played and a really happy community and all of that kind of thing, you know, I’m okay with that deal that we did, right?”, Murray said.

This so-called deal is likely a reference to what Hello Games had with Sony for the marketing of No Man’s Sky. This is why the game was a key part of Sony’s E3 2014 conference, and that meant the expectations rose significantly about the game, plus it also felt like No Man’s Sky was to be a PlayStation 4 exclusive, too. Still, Murray seems to be eager to repeat this notion, but the studio has learned from its mistakes.

„That was a very, very hard process and I wouldn’t want to put anyone through that again. I look back, having done a lot of different press opportunities and things like that. And I reckon about half of what we did—and a lot of where we had problems, I think, where we were naive—we didn’t need to do and we would have had the same level of success, you know? A lot of opportunities were put in front of us, and we were told that they were the right things to do and I look back and I’m not sure that they were super, super important to the overall outcome kind of thing,” he added.

So it feels like the next game’s pre-release marketing will be slightly toned down, and it could work. Keep in mind that in 2016, Shuhei Yoshida, the then-president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, was critical of the PR strategy of the game… even with No Man’s Sky only available on PlayStation 4 and PC at the time!

Source: PCGamer

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