UPDATED: I keep seeing a lot of comments about “Skyrim did it first” or “Bethesda always fixes their games after launch” or "Games have released buggy way before NMS" So I want to clear things up. My opinion on NMS isn’t based off of a buggy release. If you look at Skyrim at launch, it had amazing reviews averaging 9/10. It was a great game with bugs. NMS had scores averaging 5.5/10 when it released. It was a bad game with bugs and missing features and content that were marketed to be in the game. Read the last sentence slowly, in fact let me say it another way... No Man's Sky was missing things on launch that were in trailers as well as things mentioned that would be in the game via many interviews. For example if Hogwarts legacy had quidditch in the trailers, and in a IGN interview said "yes players can play quidditch, and they can do multiplayer and have their own quidditch cup!" Only to have the game be single player with no quidditch. That is what "unfinished" is to me. Games have always had bugs, NMS is not the first buggy game. I didn't say that the game was a buggy mess as launch. I said it was boring, ugly, with nothing to do, and wasn't multiplayer like hello games said it would be. It had different terrain generation from the trailers, different resource nodes, different animal generation, NO GIANT WORMS!!!! a lot of missing stuff which are now all in the game on top of so much more than anyone has expected of them. I know that large corporations are only in it for the money, but I still think Passion is still key, since Sean Murray was the co founder of the company and the devs reported to him, his passion was in NMS too, not just money. If Pete Parsons had the same passion for Destiny 2 that he had for high value cars, maybe Destiny 2 would be in a better spot and they wouldn't have lost about half of their devs in one year. Thanks for all the comments, positive and negative lol. Sorry if I don’t respond because I’ve gone from 1 video with 27 views and 0 comments to this video with 14k views and hundreds of comments.
Ehhhhhh Skyrim got rave reviews for honestly no reason. Even then it was just a significantly smaller, buggier, dumbed down version of Oblivion. Bethesda didn’t even fix it, unpaid modders did. Skyrim to Oblivion is like No Man’s Sky release to its trailer. I’m glad to see less and less people putting up with Bethesda’s nonsense, especially with the release of Starfield.
Skyrim v1.0 on PC was completely broken if one tried to run the game with High Graphics Settings or better, with a fatal crash at the point the dragon arrives at your execution. (I refunded the physical disc as defective and have never gone back!!!)
@@realspiritseekers Skyrim is relevant because you were using NMS as an example for why other developers release unfinished games. In that sense, the level to which it’s unfinished or what the reviews say are not strictly relevant.
Zero paid for DLC. Zero micro transactions. This shows me HG care about and respect the gamers. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but didn't HG development studios experience a flood early in the game development. Where they lost a good portion of what they had built?
@@lucasaurusrexhoughton8914 I wasn't 100% sure on the flood issue, so thanks for the confirmation 🙂 I feel it does go a long way to explain why NMS was so lacking in what was promised in the early days.
And it's still boring slop. The "procedural generation" is completely shit and you've seen everything after playing for a while and then there's no exploration worth doing anymore.
The real reason they were able to pull this off is *because* they are an indie studio, not despite of it. There was no shareholder board to sack the project along 100s of others because it didn't match some metric without even looking at it.
And the amount of people working on the game is tiny compared to AAa-games. According to Wikipedia there was 45 people working at Hello Games in 2022. On average you can say that a developer costs about $100K a year. That's about $4.5 million in salary expenses every year. According to Wikipedia their total equity was £136 million in 2022. They could literally not earn a single cent for 10+ years and be totally fine. Juxtapose that with AAA-games like Assassin's Creed that require a staff of around 1000 people in order to make that game. That means $100 million in salaries alone each year. Which is why they have to sell so many copies of a game to break even.
@@flammungous3068 Your estimate is pretty good. In fact they had £4.7M salary cost in 2022 for 45 employees (£104k average), but they got a big raise for 2022 because in 2021 they had salary cost of only £3.3M for 40 people ~ £82.5k per employee. I am guessing they had even lower salaries when the game came out.
@@flammungous3068 A developer definitely does not cost 100k a year. I WISH developers got paid that much. Starting devs get paid 20-30k and go up to 60-70k as seniors or lead developers.
At least now, they have the last campfire, and their next big game coming out. That's I think is supposed to be like fantasy setting. I wish I had more news on it but ADHD makes me get all distracted and as soon as the idea to look comes up, I see something else Shiney and focus on that.
They all do - time is money is shareholder value happiness. It’s all about keeping the board happy, and not the consumer/viewer/player. Art and Economics was never a good match - art takes risk, business needs to avoid it at all costs.
As someone that works at the gaming industry, I can tell you: the secret is not passion. Is money and good management (or at least, management that doesn't get in the way). EVERY developer is passionate. Most of them could earn more money in other industries. Most of the sacrifice their health for their dreams. But sometimes, studios run out of money. Sometimes, in corporations, project exceed their budget and get slashed because that's how corporations work. With good management and enough money, we would see a lot more of great games. Passion is not what's lacking. Hello Games had money to fix the game because it sold great. Even with all the refunds, they probable earned enough to cover their expenses for 10 or 20 years, since they were a small studio at the time. So they had the money to fix it. And Sean deserves praise because, as a manager, he decided to take all the heat and shield the team so they could work on improving the game. That's what made them successful. Money and good management.
But Sean was the one that over-promised the game and I can imagine the dev team wasn't very happy with the impossible task they were given. You could say Sean wasn't bad enough to be catastrophic to the game or the studio
@@BankruptGreek Sean _is_ a dev, a rather introverted one. They were so indie, they didn't have a single person who had experience talking to the press, which is why Sean did it, and the press tore him apart. He was talking about all the things he really wanted in the game, interviews eating up his time that he should've spent on making the game, while Sony setting up too short deadlines. He isn't without fault, but he never meant to over-promise for profit. The game wouldn't even have been tagged with AAA price if it wasn't for Sony.
@@csenky Utter bs! Sony had noithing to do with it! HG self published it and had total control over deadlines and release dates! Stop twisting the truth in order to excuse their mistake!
@@walterroche8192Ignorant statement. Literally every creative art, whether it’s games or music or film or writing, relies on distributors or publishers to handle circulation. Even indie studios who publish only through Steam or Epic are using those platforms as a publishing structure.
@@walterroche8192 Depends on whether they took money from the publisher and are then forced to "release or die" and the precise terms in their contract.
I love this game so much that I bought it four times for four different systems. I will support this company because I've never seen the passion and commitment like this before
Sorry but I would have to totally disagree that Hello Games shares any of the blame for current game industry issues. Releasing broken and incomplete games and promising to fix them later was already common practice when NMS released. That was one of the reasons Sean chose to maintain radio silence after the disastrous release. He wanted to make sure actions were speaking louder than words rather than fall back on the rather tired industry speak that they would fix the issues. Their success at fixing their mistakes holds little to no influence on large studios releasing games in a disgraceful state. Just look at how long it took for them to fully overcome that initial stigma. Large studios would absolutely have moved completely to other projects by then.
This. They also act like broken games never existed then, or patching wasn't a thing until PS4 and up. Like you could get doom patches in the mail on floppy discs back in the day.
He was 9 when NMS came out, he’s a baby talking from limited perspective. I know we can learn what came before without living it, but this is the reality for most.
Something people here aren't mentioning is how prevalent "fix it later" was in the MMO world. And it rarely got significantly better. EQ2 did it a bit, but couldn't compete with the WoW juggernaut. And then Final Fantasy 14 came. And it sucked. And then they stopped charging for it because it was so bad. Then they destroyed the world in-game. And months later re-released it, AND IT WAS GREAT. And is even better today. Watch the Noclip documentary. Everybody is chasing FFXIV on this when their launch sucks. NMS is another great example (NEXT fixed the game IMO), but FFXIV is the best example of literally rising from the ashes.
These types of comparisons always fail to notice the big point: Hello Games was an indie studio and NMS was their first big game. The rest of the industry is full of shitty AAA that will release a paid alpha (CP77 or Fo76) without looking at an overly medialized indie.
Also CYP77 eventually got very good. It was undercooked especially for console but playing it now on PC is honestly 9/10. It's a excellent FPS Shooter RPG
@@ultimativeslexikon5436 The main core of CP77is still not what it should be, it has so many bugs and it took ages for them to make it to a real RPG. One of the best examples is that the Police is still trash.
@@BerosCerberus but seriously way less trash than the police spawning behind your back, while you are on top of a building. Now they can summon Max Tec and wipe the floor with your sorry butt.
My hot take is that we shloud also blame the gamers. Don't preorder games, don't buy games in early access. Wait for reviews before buying. The studios are able to do this, because we give them money even before release. They than have no reason to finish the product.
One of the coolest things is that they took that early gaffe of the two players finding the same spot and not seeing each other, and they put that into the story of the game. 😎😎👍👍
@@realspiritseekers Yep, without going into any spoilers, in the main story, a character tells you to meet them at a certain spot. You get there and you determine you are both in the same exact spot but can't see each other for some reason. 😉
Hey remember when our sh*t eating ceo sean murray lied to you and said this game was multiplayer? We've added that to the main quest narrative, isn't that cute?
Personally I never believed Sean Murray was a liar, just eagerly optimistic about a game that took a lot more work and resources than anticipated. I just got into the game after the steam summer sale, so IDK how bad it really was before worlds 1
@@efxnews4776 I had no idea the news on it lately. I saw launch and was still intrigued by the game but was always waiting for a good sale after the initial launch. I am disappointed I missed so many expeditions apparently
No Man's Sky is such a good game. On Steam, I have 10690 screenshots taken with the photo mode. I played for hundreds of hour and keep finding new stuff and lore, this game is infinite. The story is super good, the turning points and concept of the world is amazing. This game truly is amazing
When you asked “how are they able to pull this off as a small studio” my immediate response was, they aren’t only in it for the money like so many bigger studios.
I'm pretty sure they are making money *because* they are small. Much less overhead, smaller team, no C-suite executives with bloated bonus packages. With the regular updates, I've seen NMS in the top sellers every so often. So even on sale, they've got to paying the bills comfortably.
Problem is most companies can't and won't fix a game post launch like no man's sky. They release trash and leave it trash. No man's sky said nah my bad I got this
@re_4merchant yea but I've played 76 and it has never made the level of improvements that no man's sky has. It's made a lot of improvements but I feel like it went from trash to just decent.
@re_4merchant fair enough got me there 🤣 and I wouldn't say dumpster fire but it's not great or even good. I think decent is fair. But decent or average isn't really much of a compliment
After No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 I promised myself I wouldn't pre-order a game ever again, I haven't broken that promise, but I will for Hello Games, I want to trust that they will deliver on Light No Fire, I want to give them my money so they can continue building NMS and eventually LNF
@@lordquadrato437 I do something similar (but only with indie titles): buy at early access, then play or let it sit until well done. The reality is that game devs need player feedback to make a game good and also waiting until it's 100% good is often not financially viable.
My son (then 10 years old) showed me NMS, and we played it together for quite a few months. Then, the hype behind Starfield hit. It blew my mind how so many people were just astounded by the idea that SF was going to be procedurally generated. Like Bethesda was doing some crazy, unprecedented act and that no one had ever attempted it before. Sadly, when you mentioned NMS to most of these people, they all either bashed it or dismissed it. The irony is that having now played probably an equal amount of both games, Starfield is in the exact same position NMS was in the beginning. The hype train derailed, and now everyone is criticizing Bethesda. I'm looking forward to getting back into NMS and seeing if I can get my son back into it as well, while I wait and see if Bethesda can pull off a hat trick and redeem SF.
I like parts of stsarfield. And Bethesda fixed a lot of Fallout 76, I would like a fixed starfield, though with Elder Scrolls 6 in the works I don’t know if they’d pull resources to that.
Unfortunately it's impossible for Bethesda to fully make Starfield into what we were hyped to believe. To do that they would need to start from scratch with an entirely new game engine. The engine they used for Starfield is long outdated. So even if we give Bethesda eight years to fix Starfield, that just means the engine would be eight more years behind the times And if they're planning to use that same engine to create Elder Scrolls 6, we already know how bad that game is going to be
I took this game off my Steam wishlist after the abysmal launch reviews came in, and all these years later had no idea it had become what it is today. It's back on my list, thanks for this!
You cannot fault the dedication or passion of Hello Games. To still be pushing free updates and content 8 yrs after release is extraordinary. I was a pre-release backer and I'll admit to being a little disappointed at launch with what was delivered. But, Sean Murray's passion for the project always shone through and it convinced me to stick around and enjoy the ride...and oh boy, am I glad I did. Around 1500 hrs, over multiple saves, I still find myself looking forward to the next set of improvements and expeditions. This can't last forever I know, but I am gonna enjoy it while does 🙂 Great video too btw!
As a very mature gamer of the age of 57 years old, and seeing and playing video games since they were first created.Well I remember playing the old original Elite game back in the day and loving it so much, but maxed my ship out and made loads of money in it.But also thought that's it as far as I could go with it.But always dreamed of a game you could do more and land on planet's ect. But never did I ever think a game like No Mans Sky could ever be created with so many things to do, and space battles, and so many planets to.All that growing up just felt like a gamers dream. So I guess what iam saying now is, well No Mans Sky for me is the most significant game for many decades.And with updates that just keep coming, and making the game even better, well I just feel this game is so special and will be talked about for years to come, and played to.And Hello Games have changed the gaming industry for many years to come, and with Light No Fire coming, well exciting times to come.Which I feel I haven't seen in modern gaming for a few decades.Thank you Hello Games and Mr Sean Murray, you truly are giving us how gaming used to be with no money grabbing dlcs and microtractions.😊😲💪
Funny, be cause exactly Elite was the game that ALSO had procedurally generated worlds (albeit much simpler ones). When he said "no game did this before" I screamed out "Elite did it, bro". Ok, admittedly at much lower scale but the did have to max out available hardware to pull of Elite.
There is a difference, NMS got destroyed by everyone they stopped saying anything and they worked when nobody expected them to. It was not their original plan. The other games plan to release unfinished, communicate about future updates and do not deliver. What they say is meaningless, what they do is everything.
There is no syndrome; it’s just software development. Why Hello Games made it happen is because despite how horrible the game was on release it was a huge commercial success and they made an enormous amount of money which funded years of effort from the small team to redeem themselves and build the game they envisioned; which is what they wanted to do and had the freedom to do. Cyberpunk is a similar story. It was despite all criticism a huge commercial success and CD Projekt Red had the independence to prioritize work towards Cyberpunk. Bigger studios owned and funded by larger corporations and publishers don’t get to choose what funding they get nor what projects get greenlit; so when the product they sell is not a commercial success, they don’t get additional funding to work on the same product. And even if it is, they’re likely already planned for the next thing to build and ship, so get limited funding for improvements and upkeep - if they even survive releasing a commercial failure. In the case of Redfall - Arkane Austin, the studio thst built it, asked for it to be cancelled. They were tasked to build something they didn’t want to build and were now being tasked to fix something they didn’t believe in to begin with. And this predates NMS. Day 1 patches have become the standard in release planning since they’ve been technically possible. It’s all just product development and business decisions.
The development cycle now includes the user base, who pay to debug the alpha release. I generally wait three years or more before trying a new game. I'd rather pay $20 for a finished product than $60 for an alpha version.
They earned a ginormous amount. For a small indie, that was funds for 10 years+ instantly at launch. And they kept selling each year. They sold a million copies at launch, but it's 10 million+ copies now. Imagine it. They don't have a board or investors that will run off with the money. Indies games are the only games we should ever support. Really.
Hello Games is a team from 16 years ago, it's a shame that the entire industry is failing so massively that the past beats them harder than their parents should have.
I think you are right that passion is part of the reason why NMS is so good. The other part is because they are a small company. Quick google search says they've sold 10-12 million copies, and have a staff of 20-40 people. $60 USD cost of the game means they have made enough money to host 900 staff for 10 years (assuming no other costs and 80k a year pay), yet they only have 20-40. I know that's just rough math but the margins they are working within shows why they have such an advantage. They succeed where AAA companies fail because they do not outgrow themselves, because they are not chasing ever increasing profit. They are not trying to release a game every few years. They can take the time to push free updates and keep them free. They are chasing their passion and the realization of their dream game because there is no corpo bs. I do not expect much from AAA anymore, but I'm quietly optimistic whenever I hear about a small studio doing something ambitious, because they have the freedom from corporate greed and corporate expectations to do so.
I've had enough about people talking about "Sean's lies" I know those sound like it but they were promises, the guy knew all the posibilities "The Formula" would be able to create but didn't have the time to complete it. When you talk to Sean you understand he's a genius! but you also realise he isn't entirely cut to be the one talking to media. You said something about the passion and that there's no microtransactions or DLCs that cost you money but we also need to mention the Expeditions, those aren't just more content or expansions, those are proof they really want people to play their game while showing you aspects of the game that you could have missed between updates. I think its beautiful how they reward you with very cool things just by playing the expeditions and those are free.
He quite literally LIED about the game. He LIED about what features the game had. He even lied about it being a multiplayer game when it was releasing as a singleplayer game. He LIED.
@@OCinneide Yep, he lied. He wanted to make a sandbox exploration game on a large scale, with good enough basic structure to expand upon for years. The promise itself was so good, that Sony got involved. So Sony provided the full AAA package of publicity and box price, while setting up a surreal release date. All that for an indie company of about ~8 people at the time. They had noone to handle the press, so the overly introverted Sean took it upon himself. I believe that was his only mistake in the whole story. Handling the media. He was led into corners in every interview, visibly uncomfortable and anxious, he obviously couldn't be honest, because Sony was involved with pretty strict arrangements. So yea, Sean lied. What a monster.
I like No man's sky because they keep updating it, and they do not call it a "Free DLC" like other companies do to trick people into thinking the company is a good company for releasing a "free DLC" like the god of war "free DLC" is just a story update
Any kind of _update_ that introduces content (not just bugfixes, which would be a _patch_) is a DLC by definition. NMS updates are free DLCs just the same as Path of Exile updates are free DLCs (to an already free game in that case). That said, I'm not sure how exactly does giving a free DLC for God of War makes the company look bad, specially when God of War was a huge success anyway, nothing to hate them for. Where is the trick?
@@csenky It's not about the technicality, but the way it's marketed. Just calling it an update just sounds so much more appealing to me as a customer. I'd probably find it annoying if GGG kept saying "The free Settlers of Kalguur DLC", "The free Conquerors of the Atlas DLC" etc.
Insert mandatory "why the frick does this channel only hawe 514 subscribers ?!?" here. This is genuinely a very well produced and interresting video. Thank you! Subbed.
As a strict VR gamer, who has hours in NMS clocked tenfold more than the next one, I concur.. it’s a lightning in a bottle. An anomaly. An exception. A true work of art. 💙
What nms was like on release is roughly what I expected, minus the bugs, maybe a little less. It was developed by a team of 4 people for majority of it, they were a tiny studio, and aside from things brought up in interviews, he was relatively consistent about the core stuff. I was relatively happy with it on release, except the bugs. But what it is now is WILD. Its AMAZING. I do wish they had a fully offline, single player version still, the lonely exploration captured by the game a year into release has never really returned as a possibility. But it is an AMAZING game and achievement
I don't think it's *just* "passion". One big part is that the only shareholders to make happy are the employees of Hello Games themselves. I bet every dev would have loved to fix the games that were released in a broken state, but their bosses are beholden to the shareholders and those bought shares because they want stock yields - this year, not next year or later. Also, Hello Games is a comparatively small studio and the ones calling the shots are IN that same studio. Small teams can be a lot more flexible while also requiring a lot less money to function so one big success makes so much cash that you can keep the studio running for a long time. There's downsides to that as well though: all those updates (mostly) included small additions and adjustments. Like a whole update that makes some planets purple and has a new type of randomized ship. An update with like 10 underwater base building parts (and a short repetitive quest to introduce them). The flora and fauna have mostly been the same for years at this point. Small teams just can't make a ton of changes in a short period of time. People compare version 1.0 of No Man's Sky with today's version but they forget that this was 8 years ago at this point. Of course a big publisher with millions to blow *could* theoretically fix their game and add tons of stuff in a year's time, but this is where the inflexibility of large teams comes into play which effectively throws a wrench into those plans. This is also the reason why Bethesda has these weird open worlds where somehow bizarrely hardly anything is actually interconnected and player's choices often result in a differently colored flag, a dead NPC that was irrelevant for anything else - or absolutely nothing happening other than a check mark in the quest log and 100 more gold in the purse. They "fixed" the large team issue by making a huge world map and then let their quest designers go wild in their own tiny little world of quest-specific NPCs - but you can't make any big impacts, otherwise the quest designers would keep shooting each other in the foot. Which is a stark contrast to New Vegas where seemingly every second quest leads to or impacts another quest and those quests can give you hidden perks, send assassins after you and change the endgame in various ways (including the choice of wiping out possibly the biggest minor faction in the game). Passion was important, but they're also in a very unique position compared to the majority of other studios: being mostly independent from the publisher while having a ton of cash reserves from a very successful (in financial terms at least) launch.
This is all true, Sean Murray is the co founder of Hello Games so the passion trickled down from the top. As to where the bigger publishers don't have someone like Sean in charge. They also, like you said, have shareholders. And the only passion in the shareholders and CEOs of these large companies have is for money.
dunno dont feel that too much, give too much excuse to big publishers, basically saying hello games could only do it cause they are so small. Sean even had to sell his frikcing house.
@@Dirty_Davos Publishers don't make games, they just pay for them. There's absolutely nothing stopping a publisher planning and financing a game with a small team to be released in six years with a defined focus. The need for big teams is only there because of short-term greed. Nothing here excuses anything on the publisher side.
I think people hating on no man's sky is overall bad and distasteful. Hello games was a small indie studio with less than 25 people working on it at first, and they expanded to 100 about 2 years after release, they got in the limelight and crumbled under pressure, but they pulled through. You cannot compare the mistakes of a originally small indie studio to the massive greedy corporations that would have done the same even if no man's sky was not in the picture. The problem is mostly c suite greed, the fact that a game needs to release in a financial year even if it's not ready to please shareholders, underfunding development, forcing them to stupid decisions as retrofitting engines or interfering with art directions, and the endless stories of c suite people prioritizing their own stock options and bonuses rather than funding the game development. No man's is a good example of a studio trying to right their wrongs, and make their game better and better through passion, as you pointed out at 13:30
Passion. If they didnt fix it the company was done they didnt have a choice. And it still sucks. The only people who say otherwise difnt have a problem with it in the beginning. You’re not a reliable source. The reliable sources moved on a long time ago.
Games have a much longer lifespan in this decade than they did in decades past. Skyrim’s relevance, in my opinion, lasted nearly ten years. The lifespan of MMOs is even longer. While I definitely DO NOT think it is okay for studios to misrepresent what their games will be able to do at launch, I do think we’re in an era where the first release of long-lifetime games will feel more like a tech demo, and they’ll grow into their potential over a period of years. The other model for this phenomenon is Star Citizen, which is taking the alternate route of staying in alpha/beta forever.
They're making money because more and more people keep buying the game at a steady pace. Its not tethered to the launch week business model. It's easily the best value per dollar on steam. And I payed full price for it at launch. Good product, fair price will always win. Also it feels like an appreciating asset. It keeps getting better. Not to mention the gazillion hours of free advertising from streamers and UA-camrs.
I bought this game at launch. Played a few dozen hours and then sat on it for years until last week. Now a hundred hours in and still going hard. It’s a good time to get into the game
Since the last update of No Man's Sky, I've been playing the game almost every day. It's really become incredibly good and is a lot of fun. I had no expectations of the game and after many years I was still immensely impressed by it.
A thing you forgot is that those big companies have investors and they have to keep investors happy. Investors don't want to see numbers in red, even though games development requires you to dip into the red from time to time. And only after a long time of investment do games reap rewards, something that no investor will ever understand, or want to understand. I'm not saying investors are evil because they do what they do. It's just that their way of thinking about how to make money is just purely incompatible with the videogames industry, how we value dedication and passion in the face of making no money at all. And how we reward those companies we like with a purchase.
Hello games wanted to make No Man's Sky amazing, and when they failed on release they probably panicked, not because of the money, but because they didn't deliver on the universe they wanted to make. So they said "I'm going to fix this no matter how long it takes!" and they did. And it worked. They made a mistake and they had the drive to fix it and make it into the game they wanted to play. Other AAA studios missed that. What they saw was a game that sucked that still got a *lot* of sales because they said "we'll fix it later." So they started telling their devs to just copy NMS and release a half baked game. But in this case when the devs panic, it's not because they didn't make a good game, they panic because their game bombing means that they could lose funding or get fired. When the devs say "I'm going to fix this no matter how long it takes." The CEOs lean and say "Well actually no you're not because we aren't gunna "waste" our money on that. It's your fault you didn't successfully trick the community like NMS did." The AAA studios completely missed the point and have forgotten that passion and love for your project actually makes a difference and that the players can tell when it's there.
No hate just my opinion. These kinds of releases have been happening since forever and while it is a huge problem with the industry, claiming it was no man's sky's fault that that happens is ridiculous.
I agree. There is a big difference between independent studios releasing games in early access and triple A studios releasing unfinished products. The first big difference is the pricing. Even No Man Sky is frequently on sale for $30. Most early access games are clearly marked as such and are priced low.
Exactly,comparing AAA games who have access to endless resources and tens ,if not hundreds of developers to a game feveloped by a small team is a bit unfair,specially when AAA games have no excuse to be released in such terrible states we see them at launch
I bought NMS a couple of years ago when it went on a big special for few bucks since I finally realised they had VR support and thought "that could look cool". I played maybe a couple of days, got bored of grinding the base building mission.... thinking this game is going nowhere, and noped out a couple more years. Coincidentally, earlier this year I picked it up again, thought "hey this isn't half bad now" and then just a couple of months into me playing it casually they dropped the new update.. As a software (not game) dev that has spent decades refining and building on the same massive piece of software, I'm not used to seeing the same thing in the gaming industry with rare exception (eve online). I can REALLY appreciate a game developer that's willing to stick with it, not screw their fans, "make good", ... AND deliver a jaw dropping game. That takes commitment and grit. I know.
The reason nms has become the posterboy of zero to hero, is because they're the only developers at the time that actually gave a crap about the community. The thing that the general public who either didn't play the game or played it and it didn't scrtach the itch didn't know, was that there was a huge fanbase that kept playing the game after launch and continued to support it because even in the first 6 months, the game was an anomaly that didn't exist anywhere else. Any person with an imagination completely fell in love with it, and could see the base for something truly special. Once they added VR, it became the greatest achievement and experience I'd ever had in my 30+ years of gaming. It became the experience I had been waiting for from gaming. The pointing fingers and screams of lies could in turn be pointed back at the interviews and interviewees. The 70 questions interview alone has responses that are ambiguous. He's responding in regards to game at present in development that was constantly changing. And the anger towards the trailer I can understand, but aren't most trailers built to sell the product? For me hello games are a shinning light in a rotten industry who stood by a creation they were proud of and continue to make even better. And because they simply will not accept money, I bought the last campfire as a way of saying thank you for making a game that I'd dreamt of. So I think zero to hero isn't the correct way to evaluate hello games and nms. I think a small dev team dreamed big and delivered, so in my book they were already heroes.
7 years ago, I bought a ps4 just to play no man’s sky. I quickly lost interest in the game and pretty much forgot about it. A week ago, I stumbled on some of the hype around the worlds release and booted up the game for the first time in years starting from the very beginning. To say I was blown away is an understatement! It was the most engaging opening hours of a game I’ve played in years. The design is brilliant how it gives you just enough objectives to learn the mechanics of the game before releasing you to explore the near infinite universe.
My guy, I have no idea how you can list out the problem with the game industry, hold up one company as an example and yet miss the target of the cause all in 15 mins. It's not _"passion"_ or lack of passion why the game industry is doing this, it's the fact that Game Developers are OWNED by Publishing companies, who set the budgets and time tables for these development studios. They have contractual obligations to meet release dates. This didn't used to be the thing. the relationship actually was the inverse for the longest time, where Publishers were at the behest of the Developer, and the Developer dictated to the publisher as to when they are ready, and the publisher basically was just the marketing people, and the folks that printed the cartridges, and later the disks and got them into stores. THAT IS NOT HOW IT IS ANYMORE. Publishers are the ones that dictate to Developers, and often times even set the projects. This is why it's attracted some of the most dog sh*t tier practices. And btw, if you want to know WHO was the first to start doing this, and more over the person that invented it. The company was EA, and the man John Riccitiello. There are many who don't know who this man is, and others who are well versed in who this man is. To those that don't. This man has had more of an effect in the games you play, even if said game wasn't an EA game, than ANY other person on the planet. This A**hole created policy, that other game publishers emulated because they saw the apparent success of EA. "If EA can do it, why can't we.", The problem? Is that it was all a f**king fraud. EA wasn't successful because the policies worked. EA just engaged in creative accounting to make it seem that way. EA would purchase development studios, and add the "projected value" of said studio based on their historical "pre EA" performance to EA's total value, this causing stock prices to go up, because the excitement and perception that EA has this famous developer that made "X franchise", and so it pumped their stock values up, and thus their perceived value as a whole. Anyone who has been a fan of certain developers before EA bought them, know what I mean. The "Pre-EA" games are great, the "Post-EA" games, Mid to dogsh*t. EA would hide the losses in their other investments, then keep doing the same thing over and over. Anyone with a brain can immediately see the problem here. That this is an unsustainable business practice, because eventually all the studios will be bought, and the "rob peter to pay paul" move won't work. And guess what, that's exactly what happened, EA, Activision, Blizzard and a bunch of other publishers, fucking caved in. a bunch of studios completely dissolved, employees either laid off or more often, consolidated into new studios made up of the bunch of studios. The publishers citing that various "efficiency and cost cutting measures" as if it was always in the plans to do this. A massive consolidation of the industry. various legislation for more stern enforcement of non-competes and NDAs. Now flash forward to today, were those sh*tty practices, combined with the political slant IE 'woke' appeasement, has driven these publishers even further into the ground. Now you have lay offs happening by the 10's of thousands at a time. The one saving grace, the declaration by the FTC that, the previously rigidness of the non-competes and NDAs was strangling the industry (which it was), and thus the repeal of them. Allowing all these people to start forming independent companies again, and THIS time, they have learned the lesson of being very careful about taking publisher money and allow themselves to be bought out. So to you point about why Hello Games was able to pull this off while others aren't. It's because Hello Games isn't owned by a publisher, they work WITH publishers but not owned BY a publisher. That's why, that and due to their small team size and efficient team they are able to finance free update after free update. If they were owned by a publisher, said publisher would have told them to move onto the next project long ago. As far as Sean Murray, yeah the dude lied. Big time and he's an a**hole for doing it, no excuse. However I also know that during one of those presentations at E3 he was publicly humiliated, like the dude was trembling it was that bad. I think he took that to heart, went back to the studio and put himself on a mission to fix the game, rather than embrace the sweet release of a deadman's necktie, if you catch my meaning. So I'll give him credit for cleaning up his own mess, a mess that HE DID create. But I am not going to hang the industry failures and practices on this one man or one company. Especially since such practices were already in play before Murray ever took to a stage. I will place the blame, on the one man and one company that STARTED the practices, and who DO deserve the blame. Though, I will also blame the idiots at the other publishers who in turn emulated it, and upon seeing their failing performance, didn't stop immediately to ask, "Why wasn't it working?" I think if they did, instead of doubling down, EA's "fraud" would have come to light sooner. I say this as someone who used to work in the industry and watched it turn into this absolute embarrassment that it has. Chiefly due to it's piss-poor management and "administration" NOT the developers.
On the topic of "how are they making money" They made the money when it sold like absolute mad. Many refunds were issued, but many more weren't. The salaries of every employee are paid for decades. The way they did it was by actually using the ridiculous profit to pay their employees rather than mega million bonuses for the C suite. No Mans Sky was made by a relatively small team, and while it may not have been the generation defining masterpiece many expected it was still a wildly popular game. Millions of copies have been sold, and sales have continued in the 2020's as more and more updates continue to expand the appeal of the game. The money has already been made. Why does it need to be a continual trickle when they got a lump sum up front?
Add to that upfront sum the huge boost in sales with every free update and you realize that those free updates pay for themselves a thousand times over
Between Bethesda and NMS the entire industry now just assumes they can drop complete crap and fix it later and the fans will not only forgive them but call it an epic comeback. Sean Murray at the end of the day was the villain that got away with it.
I was playing Starfield, but kinda got bored when I proceeded through the alternate universes. Because of everything you covered in this video, I'm downloading No Man's Sky right now, so Thanks for that.
Bought on release day, dissapointed with the rest of planet Earth, uninstalled it. I bought my Quest VR head set a litter over year later and was looking for something emersive. I was told by a friend that NMS is worth the purchase now so I re-installed it and was astounded by all the improvements. I love all things SciFi so when I put my VR gear on and was able to BE the Traveler, I was like OMG, this was my #1 VR experience game to date.
No man sky were manage to fix because they weren't made by a corporation. They made a lot of money by launching this game in it unfinished conditions. And spent a lot of it to fix it and clean his name. For a Bethesda or a cd project red, shareholders would prefer their company loosing their reputation than spending millions of dollars fixing it
CD Projekt have a pretty good track record for fixing their blunders. Not such a great track record for avoiding blunders in the first place, but credit where it's due.
Till this day NMS still has the best economy loop to exploit and get rich PRETTY DAMN FAST. It gets much faster if you already have a freighter simply due to the cargo space capacity. 1. Gather chlorine 2. Duplicate chlorine using oxygen (or the mobile refinery duplication glitch if you're lazy) ideally you want at least a whole stack of 999 units of Cl 3. find a system that sells chlorine 4. sell all of your chlorine 5. the market gets flooded with your chlorine and immediately crashes going from something between +2%/ -2% price to something like -70% 6. buy back all of your chlorine dirt cheap + all of the chlorine they already had 7. find another system that sells chlorine, repeat 4-6. 8. continue repeating steps 3-6 until your units come in billions. Important thing is to sell as whole and not as stacks cause if you sell as stacks after first stack you're losing money, but you can just sell entire stock in one go, all for one price. It should take like one session of playing. Eventually you can speed up the process by finding another element that has a reasonably high price and is reasonably uncommon so that you can double your chance of selling in any given system. as per the mobile refinery glitch - you can just put 10 mobile refineries without moving mouse once in one and the same spot, so that they overlap, put a stack of something in it, and then destroy all of the refineries to gain 10 stacks of what you put in back. The game treats it like they all had the same thing inside and upon destruction it returns you what it thinks was inside.
No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk are both made by people who want to make something cool, who are passionet for the game and consequently has the game this "Soul", if it doesn't have this "Soul" then there is nothing to fix.
No Man's Sky got fixed and will continue to get updated forever because Hello Games can actually afford to do it. Hello Games has a net income of around $45 million USD for (probably) less than 10 shareholders (only guessing, its a private company founded by 4 people). Its a tiny company of only 45 employees, so they only have to sell about 90000 copies of the game per year to break even. And even if sales fully dried up tomorrow, their passion project could continue to be supported by coasting on the company's equity for another 30 years. They got rich real fast and they are using that money to make the game they always wanted to make. They don't need to expand their business to make more money. They don't need to make new games to make more money. They already have all the money they will ever need.
I bought NMS a few weeks ago as one of the 'must-have' games to play with a PSVR2 headset. Obviously there is a bit of a drop-off between the quality of graphics achievable on the PSVR2 and what you get on PC or PS5. But holy sh-t, the immersive nature of this game is something else. It's taken me about 10-12 sessions (1-2hrs each) to master most of the basic commands and menus and stuff - just visited the anomaly. So I have barely scratched the surface. I also really appreciate the Awakenings quest which gives you a bunch of objectives to teach you most of the core gameplay. But I'm addicted. Putting on the headset and wandering around on an alien planet, surrounded by moons and stars and other planets is genuinely what I was hoping for as a kid many years ago from video games. It feels like living in the future. Jet-packing into an ocean and swimming around, then standing up with the surface lapping around your helmet. It's insane. And looking at the menus and logs, I haven't even seen 95% of what the game offers. I remember reading about this game at launch and thinking it sounded quite dull. But 26 updates later.... it's an incredible experience. So thanks to Sean Murray and Hello Games. The dude had a vision. Just took him 8 years to fully realise it.
The practice of releasing unfinished games actually started with patches. When the internet actually became a thing, patching games became ubiquitous fairly shortly thereafter. Yes, patches existed before as well (in the discs provided in gaming magazines) but they were far less common and usually addressed very big issues.
I guess I am saying how old I am, but back in the day... like in the 80's when computers started to come out for the C64 and the likes, you bought the game, and that was it. If there was a bug - you had to figure out how to play around it. Games came in a box, with a really big game manual... Those were the days....
The problem is that the big AAA studios are so focused on profits, with accountants and shareholders on their back (as well as upper management bonuses reliant on sales performance), that it makes more financial sense to cut and run rather than to work it into a good game.
damn, you're incredibly underrated for such high quality content everything from editing to discussion topics and pacing is very on point, i was really surprized that you don't have hundreds of thousands of subs by now with how good it is! i bet it's only a matter of short time till you find your audience, keep up the good work mate!!!
NMS is as much an experience and a community as it is a game. Free update after free update has finally gone far beyond the original hype and delivered so much more than any of us ever thought possible. OK so it's not an edge of your seat fps, an action packed whatever or a convoluted story driven jrpg. NMS isn't for everyone and that's fine by me and clearly thousands of other players who have spent hundreds of hours chilling, exploring and building across a game so vast we will never be able to see it all. I was one of those players who was disappointed at launch but thankfully I kept dipping back into the game and now years later I still find it my go to relaxation space and honestly can't believe how much content Hello Games have added without asking for a single penny more.
The main problem remains, the game is very very shallow, there's a lot of systems and things "to do" but every aspect, be it combat, exploration or building is poor gameplay wise.
I first played this game in 2020 around the release of origins and the next generation updates, don't remember the specifics. A homie and I played and got about 80hrs deep before losing interest. I just picked it up again and have been loving it. There's an interview I came across recently with Sean and he mentioned they have no plans of slowing down even with their new title in production. Never in my life have I thought to reach out to the team who made a game, but, I've been in awe of what I've witnessed over the years. I had to get in contact just to say thank you to the Hello Games team who have made one of my favorite games. I'm so confident they won't be making the same mistake that I'll absolutely be pre-ordering their new game, it looks awesome.
Unbelievable comeback. Been 4-5 years since i played. Today i suddenly was wondering about the game. Watched a few videos and was stunned. The new game looking very interesting aswell. Big respect.
Great commentary and structure. Your imagery flows well with what you are saying. This is obviously a labor of love for you. Keep it up!! You have my subscription. Keep it coming.
That is quiet a controversial theorie. Games came out in an absolutly broken state way before No Mans Sky. Alien Colonial Marines would be a prime example for that.
It wasn't just NMS that did this. FFXIV did too, at the same time. The two pulling this off at the same time in two very different gamespaces is probably what created this effect. Had it been just NMS, I don't think it would have been as impactful.
@@realspiritseekers it is "niche" in the sense that it's an MMO and the content/player base tends to be isolated from the rest of the community, but the literal 10s of millions of players now from a game that was as lowly rated as NMS and damn near toppled SquareEnix and DID dethrone WoW as the king of MMOs, isn't something to overlook in this conversation.
I like a lot of the game, but I spend too much time in inventory management and material hunting. That's 90% of the game time, and that's not what I want to spend my time on.
I've played this game in it's release, then again in 2018, again in 2020, 2022 and I am now playing again in 2024. Seeing this game grow was amazing and I love every single thing about it. I wish all the money in the world to Hello Games lol
About the money aspect of NMS. The developers have stated that every time they update the game the sales of NMS increase. On top of that comparatively their day to day costs are rather low since as an indie studio they don't have as many expenses as a AAA studio. So the sales of the base game which always rise whenever a new (always good) update comes out makes up for the cost of making said update. So as Sean Murray said as long as that's the case they could and very well would like to update/develop NMS forever.
Friend bought it on release. Tried to get me to buy it. Thought it was shit said no, year later found it on sale for $15 figured I can give it a shot. Played it for a day, put it down for years. Got a random crave to play it with that friend a couple years ago. Been hooked ever since
Paid 70€ for the first PS4 release of NMS, was expensive but I had a blast with the game, cuz I didn't saw any of the interviews and hype growing around the game. And then came the updates, and it was brilliant, awesome. Now after 26 updates, I had many emotional roller coaster so now I don't really care, but Shawn delivered, where all the other studios who tried to do like them didn't. Great video!
I got NMS at ps4 launch, never gave up, stuck by it and alwysd tried to show others the true game that was there, glad so many are learning the joys of this world... Now Hello games is not indie in the sense so many think it is, more like AA rating for a studio, they have about 30ish people there and about 150ish British pounds in net money... So far from broke, many of the people there hold other spots in other studios (I think) but they are definitely passionate in what they do there and as a team they build each other up....
Passion Projects, Always Pull through. (They pull through, because out of spite, the passion to mould ones own imagination into something tangible lives on indefinitely - till the dream is made a reality.) If it is not a passion Project, It’s never worth it ❤
Yup, that's the difference in the intention alright. There's a difference between "I WANT to make that game, but I have failed and am unable at the time and I have to release it to get food today", which is the story of NMS, giving it the resources to realize the dream after the fact. And between "I am an executive and I want to hype the game up to the stars but spend the least amount of money as possible, so that we get lots of presales, take the money and then go on to the next thing."
Love the game. Only issue for me now is I feel like I'm constantly playing a new game plus mode. I completed storylines etc. but I feel it needs a proper ending where credits roll. Just for that sense of achievement. Then if you want to go back in where you left off you can. I'm now just going in when there is an expedition and then when complete I go back to my save and it feels kind of empty with no real objectives. I often feel I want to start again from the start when there is a decent update but then I have stuff I just can't be bothered doing again thrown in and I'm torn between wanting to play and forcing myself to play.
I know that feeling but two weeks ago i finally started a new safe. With custom difficulty that it's not such a grind again to get to a decent progress and all i can say i never had such a great time in nms.
I dont think sean lied. I think he didnt realize how much work it would be to do such a thing by the deadline sony gave them. sony screwed a very small time and then blamed them for the bad release basically. I think they did everything and more they wanted to do and kept their promises. it took a while but it happened. and EA and all those other larger studios dont care. they just wanna crank out more games cause "demand" when that demand isnt what others want. they want good carefully crafted games. I wisll die on the NMS hill. I have since its release because I KNEW it would be a good game. I knew they were gonna make it into an breathtaking adventure. did I play it for the entire time? nope. I waited patiently. then came back. but I knew it would always get better. and I will die on the hill.. or planet, that is nms.
I wrote a few paragraphs talking about how it changed my life in this comment but I realized that’s way too much no one would read. So I’ll keep it short. It changed my life. Only learned about it about two years ago or so and since then I’ve never been the same.
I think Sean’s fiscal responsibility and ethics has a lot to do with Hello Games’ success. He made a ton of money but didn’t waste it. He saved for the future of the game and the studio. ❤ to Sean.
Hello Games did not have miles of red tape. This is why they managed to do it and others cannot. Hello games stayed completely fucking SILENT for entire months while the ship was on fire. There is no AAA studio anywhere that would have that meeting where they decide to go full hermits but at the same time keep working on a failed product.
I think NMS, Minecraft and maybe some more games are moving us into a new age of "Indefinite games" where a developer is small enough and a game is popular enough that it's profits can sustain developers indefinitely by just purchases by new customers. There is enough kids getting into gaming for that.
I think in terms of the evolution of games and publishers promising "more later", it's not only No Man's Sky that's to blame for that. The first game that comes to my mind for that is Warframe. Warframe also started relatively small and feature-bare, but the difference (the most important difference, at least) was that it didn't over-promise. Warframe also had a Founders' program and an in-game store, but I think at this stage NMS business model is "Just keep adding stuff and hope people will buy it THIS time". This isn't naive or wishful thinking, IMHO, I think it's necessary because the devs know that their whole reputation going forward is staked on NMS' success, and thus its fans.
3:37 a lot of people think that in those interviews, Sean Murray was describing the game he wanted to make, not the game his studio had since he wasn't used to being held to his words as the head of an indie studio
So playing a non-VR game in a VR mode that is still meant to be played sitting is somehow more immersive than a game that is specially built for VR, with a lot of interactivity, without a need for any menu (the menus in NMS don't bother me but in VR oh god), that plays with your ability to take any items, open every drawer, amazing shooting mechanics, and DAMN the whole chapter with the blind monster was amazing. Played Half-life: Alyx twice, almost wanted to play it a third time but now I know the game, but NMS in VR I find it not as impressive. Except the exonefs, driving them in VR is so good compared to the crappy borderlands car driving system, and the game is still beautiful, VR or not.
For me there’s just a peace with getting in my ship, flying out of the atmosphere… and going anywhere. Hit the next galaxy, land on the next planet without a cut scene… it’s an escape. I adore it.
UPDATED:
I keep seeing a lot of comments about “Skyrim did it first” or “Bethesda always fixes their games after launch” or "Games have released buggy way before NMS"
So I want to clear things up. My opinion on NMS isn’t based off of a buggy release. If you look at Skyrim at launch, it had amazing reviews averaging 9/10. It was a great game with bugs. NMS had scores averaging 5.5/10 when it released. It was a bad game with bugs and missing features and content that were marketed to be in the game. Read the last sentence slowly, in fact let me say it another way...
No Man's Sky was missing things on launch that were in trailers as well as things mentioned that would be in the game via many interviews. For example if Hogwarts legacy had quidditch in the trailers, and in a IGN interview said "yes players can play quidditch, and they can do multiplayer and have their own quidditch cup!" Only to have the game be single player with no quidditch. That is what "unfinished" is to me. Games have always had bugs, NMS is not the first buggy game. I didn't say that the game was a buggy mess as launch. I said it was boring, ugly, with nothing to do, and wasn't multiplayer like hello games said it would be. It had different terrain generation from the trailers, different resource nodes, different animal generation, NO GIANT WORMS!!!! a lot of missing stuff which are now all in the game on top of so much more than anyone has expected of them.
I know that large corporations are only in it for the money, but I still think Passion is still key, since Sean Murray was the co founder of the company and the devs reported to him, his passion was in NMS too, not just money. If Pete Parsons had the same passion for Destiny 2 that he had for high value cars, maybe Destiny 2 would be in a better spot and they wouldn't have lost about half of their devs in one year.
Thanks for all the comments, positive and negative lol. Sorry if I don’t respond because I’ve gone from 1 video with 27 views and 0 comments to this video with 14k views and hundreds of comments.
Ehhhhhh Skyrim got rave reviews for honestly no reason. Even then it was just a significantly smaller, buggier, dumbed down version of Oblivion. Bethesda didn’t even fix it, unpaid modders did. Skyrim to Oblivion is like No Man’s Sky release to its trailer. I’m glad to see less and less people putting up with Bethesda’s nonsense, especially with the release of Starfield.
Skyrim v1.0 on PC was completely broken if one tried to run the game with High Graphics Settings or better, with a fatal crash at the point the dragon arrives at your execution.
(I refunded the physical disc as defective and have never gone back!!!)
You're doing just fine. Don't sweat the little things. 👍
Whoever said "Bethesda always fixes their games", I would like to send them some free copies of Redfall, Deathloop and Rage 2.
@@realspiritseekers Skyrim is relevant because you were using NMS as an example for why other developers release unfinished games. In that sense, the level to which it’s unfinished or what the reviews say are not strictly relevant.
Zero paid for DLC.
Zero micro transactions.
This shows me HG care about and respect the gamers.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but didn't HG development studios experience a flood early in the game development. Where they lost a good portion of what they had built?
Lots of people forget this!
@@lucasaurusrexhoughton8914 I wasn't 100% sure on the flood issue, so thanks for the confirmation 🙂
I feel it does go a long way to explain why NMS was so lacking in what was promised in the early days.
@@Default-Controller they did have a flood early on. And I’m sure that complicated a lot of it
They only lost hardware tho. But that isn’t nice at all 😂👌🏼
And it's still boring slop. The "procedural generation" is completely shit and you've seen everything after playing for a while and then there's no exploration worth doing anymore.
The real reason they were able to pull this off is *because* they are an indie studio, not despite of it. There was no shareholder board to sack the project along 100s of others because it didn't match some metric without even looking at it.
And the amount of people working on the game is tiny compared to AAa-games. According to Wikipedia there was 45 people working at Hello Games in 2022.
On average you can say that a developer costs about $100K a year. That's about $4.5 million in salary expenses every year.
According to Wikipedia their total equity was £136 million in 2022. They could literally not earn a single cent for 10+ years and be totally fine.
Juxtapose that with AAA-games like Assassin's Creed that require a staff of around 1000 people in order to make that game. That means $100 million in salaries alone each year. Which is why they have to sell so many copies of a game to break even.
Exactly. If they have shareholders they would sack everyone and spend the rest or remaining money with lawyers.
@@flammungous3068 Your estimate is pretty good. In fact they had £4.7M salary cost in 2022 for 45 employees (£104k average), but they got a big raise for 2022 because in 2021 they had salary cost of only £3.3M for 40 people ~ £82.5k per employee. I am guessing they had even lower salaries when the game came out.
@@flammungous3068 A developer definitely does not cost 100k a year. I WISH developers got paid that much. Starting devs get paid 20-30k and go up to 60-70k as seniors or lead developers.
@@purpledye1351 I was thinking more in line with what the company pays for each developer, not what the developer get in salary.
"Sean please, not another free update! I have money!"
Valid post. Sometimes all you need to do is give customers an opportunity to spend (more).
Sorry, what did you say? Oh, and take this new Aquarius update btw
For reaaal x3
that's why community pays off to him with fanfic erotic stories.
is it a blessing or is it a curse? let Sean decide that.
At least now, they have the last campfire, and their next big game coming out. That's I think is supposed to be like fantasy setting. I wish I had more news on it but ADHD makes me get all distracted and as soon as the idea to look comes up, I see something else Shiney and focus on that.
Sony pressured the team to release waaaaayyyyy too early. This is what ruined the launch
That's some revisionist shit. yeah it's partialy true. but let's not pretend that hello games and sean murray didn't fuck up.
@@MegaGamerscast You can't fuck up if you don't launch...
They all do - time is money is shareholder value happiness. It’s all about keeping the board happy, and not the consumer/viewer/player. Art and Economics was never a good match - art takes risk, business needs to avoid it at all costs.
As someone that works at the gaming industry, I can tell you: the secret is not passion. Is money and good management (or at least, management that doesn't get in the way).
EVERY developer is passionate. Most of them could earn more money in other industries. Most of the sacrifice their health for their dreams.
But sometimes, studios run out of money. Sometimes, in corporations, project exceed their budget and get slashed because that's how corporations work.
With good management and enough money, we would see a lot more of great games. Passion is not what's lacking.
Hello Games had money to fix the game because it sold great. Even with all the refunds, they probable earned enough to cover their expenses for 10 or 20 years, since they were a small studio at the time. So they had the money to fix it. And Sean deserves praise because, as a manager, he decided to take all the heat and shield the team so they could work on improving the game.
That's what made them successful. Money and good management.
Exactly. Just look at Hello Games financial statement. It's stellar.
But Sean was the one that over-promised the game and I can imagine the dev team wasn't very happy with the impossible task they were given. You could say Sean wasn't bad enough to be catastrophic to the game or the studio
@@BankruptGreek Sean _is_ a dev, a rather introverted one. They were so indie, they didn't have a single person who had experience talking to the press, which is why Sean did it, and the press tore him apart. He was talking about all the things he really wanted in the game, interviews eating up his time that he should've spent on making the game, while Sony setting up too short deadlines. He isn't without fault, but he never meant to over-promise for profit. The game wouldn't even have been tagged with AAA price if it wasn't for Sony.
@@csenky I see, that does shine a better light on him. We ll see how they handle their next few games
@@csenky Utter bs! Sony had noithing to do with it! HG self published it and had total control over deadlines and release dates! Stop twisting the truth in order to excuse their mistake!
The key, they are still an independant studio. No corporate CEO that knows nothing about dev and hoping to get a cashgrab and run off.
I wouldn't call ANY studio independent if they have/need a publisher.
@@walterroche8192Ignorant statement. Literally every creative art, whether it’s games or music or film or writing, relies on distributors or publishers to handle circulation. Even indie studios who publish only through Steam or Epic are using those platforms as a publishing structure.
@@walterroche8192 Depends on whether they took money from the publisher and are then forced to "release or die" and the precise terms in their contract.
@@walterroche8192 The point is, they are not focusing solely on making investors happy. They just keep making the game exactly the way they want.
@@walterroche8192 I guess you don't know how art works then. You see someone's deviantart...? Or art posted on twitter etc? Guess what bucko...
I love this game so much that I bought it four times for four different systems. I will support this company because I've never seen the passion and commitment like this before
Amen. The have it on pc and ps5 but would buy it again if I had to.
same
Purchased 3 times. Worth every cent.
I’ve bought it twice
I have it Xbox and PlayStation I mostly play Xbox though
Sorry but I would have to totally disagree that Hello Games shares any of the blame for current game industry issues. Releasing broken and incomplete games and promising to fix them later was already common practice when NMS released. That was one of the reasons Sean chose to maintain radio silence after the disastrous release. He wanted to make sure actions were speaking louder than words rather than fall back on the rather tired industry speak that they would fix the issues. Their success at fixing their mistakes holds little to no influence on large studios releasing games in a disgraceful state. Just look at how long it took for them to fully overcome that initial stigma. Large studios would absolutely have moved completely to other projects by then.
This. They also act like broken games never existed then, or patching wasn't a thing until PS4 and up. Like you could get doom patches in the mail on floppy discs back in the day.
It really wasn't common at ALL.
He was 9 when NMS came out, he’s a baby talking from limited perspective.
I know we can learn what came before without living it, but this is the reality for most.
Something people here aren't mentioning is how prevalent "fix it later" was in the MMO world. And it rarely got significantly better. EQ2 did it a bit, but couldn't compete with the WoW juggernaut.
And then Final Fantasy 14 came. And it sucked. And then they stopped charging for it because it was so bad. Then they destroyed the world in-game. And months later re-released it, AND IT WAS GREAT. And is even better today.
Watch the Noclip documentary. Everybody is chasing FFXIV on this when their launch sucks. NMS is another great example (NEXT fixed the game IMO), but FFXIV is the best example of literally rising from the ashes.
@@LoLFilmStudios don't attack the person, dude.
These types of comparisons always fail to notice the big point: Hello Games was an indie studio and NMS was their first big game. The rest of the industry is full of shitty AAA that will release a paid alpha (CP77 or Fo76) without looking at an overly medialized indie.
Also CYP77 eventually got very good. It was undercooked especially for console but playing it now on PC is honestly 9/10. It's a excellent FPS Shooter RPG
@@ultimativeslexikon5436 still a lot of bugs but yeah, it's really good overall
@@ultimativeslexikon5436 The main core of CP77is still not what it should be, it has so many bugs and it took ages for them to make it to a real RPG. One of the best examples is that the Police is still trash.
@@BerosCerberus but seriously way less trash than the police spawning behind your back, while you are on top of a building. Now they can summon Max Tec and wipe the floor with your sorry butt.
@@BerosCerberus The main core of cp77 is not what it should be? wtf are you talking about?
My hot take is that we shloud also blame the gamers. Don't preorder games, don't buy games in early access. Wait for reviews before buying. The studios are able to do this, because we give them money even before release. They than have no reason to finish the product.
Indeed. This is why I promised to myself that I won't preorder a game again.
I've gambled on a couple of Kickstarters, but I don't otherwise pre-order.
Wait for reviews *from fellow gamers* before buying. Don't trust reviews from journalists
Gamers are some of the dumbest consumers on the planet
Bought it day one, smashed out 600 hours in about 600 hours. Still playing it now.
@@Just_Be_The_Ball 600 hours nice!!!!!
Im only have 600 hours in 600 hours with 2 seconds😔
One of the coolest things is that they took that early gaffe of the two players finding the same spot and not seeing each other, and they put that into the story of the game. 😎😎👍👍
That is really cool! I did not know that.
@@realspiritseekers Yep, without going into any spoilers, in the main story, a character tells you to meet them at a certain spot. You get there and you determine you are both in the same exact spot but can't see each other for some reason. 😉
hooooooooolllyy SHIIIIIIITITTTTTTTTTT i played through the entire story and never even thought of that, holy fucking shit
Hey remember when our sh*t eating ceo sean murray lied to you and said this game was multiplayer? We've added that to the main quest narrative, isn't that cute?
My mind is blown.
Personally I never believed Sean Murray was a liar, just eagerly optimistic about a game that took a lot more work and resources than anticipated. I just got into the game after the steam summer sale, so IDK how bad it really was before worlds 1
Doesn't matter anymore, Welcome interloper!
It has been great for at least some 3 years by now...
@@efxnews4776 I had no idea the news on it lately. I saw launch and was still intrigued by the game but was always waiting for a good sale after the initial launch. I am disappointed I missed so many expeditions apparently
NMS has so much going on now that every time I return I have to restart my save because I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing anymore.
No Man's Sky is such a good game. On Steam, I have 10690 screenshots taken with the photo mode. I played for hundreds of hour and keep finding new stuff and lore, this game is infinite. The story is super good, the turning points and concept of the world is amazing.
This game truly is amazing
When you asked “how are they able to pull this off as a small studio” my immediate response was, they aren’t only in it for the money like so many bigger studios.
and then I got to the part when you pretty much said that
trying to be 2 steps ahead!
I'm pretty sure they are making money *because* they are small. Much less overhead, smaller team, no C-suite executives with bloated bonus packages. With the regular updates, I've seen NMS in the top sellers every so often. So even on sale, they've got to paying the bills comfortably.
@@realspiritseekersi thought you were referring to avocado but this was a month before the video 🤯
Problem is most companies can't and won't fix a game post launch like no man's sky. They release trash and leave it trash. No man's sky said nah my bad I got this
I honestly believe 76 was a direct attempt by Bethesda to try to mimic them, but add dlc and paywalls to profit.
@re_4merchant yea but I've played 76 and it has never made the level of improvements that no man's sky has. It's made a lot of improvements but I feel like it went from trash to just decent.
@@piratehunterreviews9958 key word in my comment is “attempt” i think its still a dumpster fire of a game
@re_4merchant fair enough got me there 🤣 and I wouldn't say dumpster fire but it's not great or even good. I think decent is fair. But decent or average isn't really much of a compliment
@@piratehunterreviews9958 alot closer of a description would be “playable” but at least for me that isn’t even true.
After No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 I promised myself I wouldn't pre-order a game ever again, I haven't broken that promise, but I will for Hello Games, I want to trust that they will deliver on Light No Fire, I want to give them my money so they can continue building NMS and eventually LNF
Just preorder and then let the game sit in your library for 2 years xD
well that's wishful thinking...
@@lordquadrato437 I do something similar (but only with indie titles): buy at early access, then play or let it sit until well done. The reality is that game devs need player feedback to make a game good and also waiting until it's 100% good is often not financially viable.
CDPR and Hello Games are basically the same. Bad launch, but fix it after. Witcher 3 started like that, so did CP2077.
2077 2.0 is beautiful
My son (then 10 years old) showed me NMS, and we played it together for quite a few months. Then, the hype behind Starfield hit. It blew my mind how so many people were just astounded by the idea that SF was going to be procedurally generated. Like Bethesda was doing some crazy, unprecedented act and that no one had ever attempted it before. Sadly, when you mentioned NMS to most of these people, they all either bashed it or dismissed it. The irony is that having now played probably an equal amount of both games, Starfield is in the exact same position NMS was in the beginning. The hype train derailed, and now everyone is criticizing Bethesda. I'm looking forward to getting back into NMS and seeing if I can get my son back into it as well, while I wait and see if Bethesda can pull off a hat trick and redeem SF.
I like parts of stsarfield. And Bethesda fixed a lot of Fallout 76, I would like a fixed starfield, though with Elder Scrolls 6 in the works I don’t know if they’d pull resources to that.
Unfortunately it's impossible for Bethesda to fully make Starfield into what we were hyped to believe. To do that they would need to start from scratch with an entirely new game engine. The engine they used for Starfield is long outdated. So even if we give Bethesda eight years to fix Starfield, that just means the engine would be eight more years behind the times
And if they're planning to use that same engine to create Elder Scrolls 6, we already know how bad that game is going to be
Its so good now
I took this game off my Steam wishlist after the abysmal launch reviews came in, and all these years later had no idea it had become what it is today. It's back on my list, thanks for this!
You cannot fault the dedication or passion of Hello Games. To still be pushing free updates and content 8 yrs after release is extraordinary. I was a pre-release backer and I'll admit to being a little disappointed at launch with what was delivered. But, Sean Murray's passion for the project always shone through and it convinced me to stick around and enjoy the ride...and oh boy, am I glad I did. Around 1500 hrs, over multiple saves, I still find myself looking forward to the next set of improvements and expeditions. This can't last forever I know, but I am gonna enjoy it while does 🙂 Great video too btw!
Hell yeah
As a very mature gamer of the age of 57 years old, and seeing and playing video games since they were first created.Well I remember playing the old original Elite game back in the day and loving it so much, but maxed my ship out and made loads of money in it.But also thought that's it as far as I could go with it.But always dreamed of a game you could do more and land on planet's ect.
But never did I ever think a game like No Mans Sky could ever be created with so many things to do, and space battles, and so many planets to.All that growing up just felt like a gamers dream.
So I guess what iam saying now is, well No Mans Sky for me is the most significant game for many decades.And with updates that just keep coming, and making the game even better, well I just feel this game is so special and will be talked about for years to come, and played to.And Hello Games have changed the gaming industry for many years to come, and with Light No Fire coming, well exciting times to come.Which I feel I haven't seen in modern gaming for a few decades.Thank you Hello Games and Mr Sean Murray, you truly are giving us how gaming used to be with no money grabbing dlcs and microtractions.😊😲💪
Funny, be cause exactly Elite was the game that ALSO had procedurally generated worlds (albeit much simpler ones). When he said "no game did this before" I screamed out "Elite did it, bro". Ok, admittedly at much lower scale but the did have to max out available hardware to pull of Elite.
Also 57 here, and I agree completely!
There is a difference, NMS got destroyed by everyone they stopped saying anything and they worked when nobody expected them to. It was not their original plan.
The other games plan to release unfinished, communicate about future updates and do not deliver.
What they say is meaningless, what they do is everything.
There is no syndrome; it’s just software development.
Why Hello Games made it happen is because despite how horrible the game was on release it was a huge commercial success and they made an enormous amount of money which funded years of effort from the small team to redeem themselves and build the game they envisioned; which is what they wanted to do and had the freedom to do.
Cyberpunk is a similar story. It was despite all criticism a huge commercial success and CD Projekt Red had the independence to prioritize work towards Cyberpunk.
Bigger studios owned and funded by larger corporations and publishers don’t get to choose what funding they get nor what projects get greenlit; so when the product they sell is not a commercial success, they don’t get additional funding to work on the same product. And even if it is, they’re likely already planned for the next thing to build and ship, so get limited funding for improvements and upkeep - if they even survive releasing a commercial failure.
In the case of Redfall - Arkane Austin, the studio thst built it, asked for it to be cancelled. They were tasked to build something they didn’t want to build and were now being tasked to fix something they didn’t believe in to begin with.
And this predates NMS. Day 1 patches have become the standard in release planning since they’ve been technically possible.
It’s all just product development and business decisions.
The development cycle now includes the user base, who pay to debug the alpha release. I generally wait three years or more before trying a new game. I'd rather pay $20 for a finished product than $60 for an alpha version.
They earned a ginormous amount. For a small indie, that was funds for 10 years+ instantly at launch. And they kept selling each year. They sold a million copies at launch, but it's 10 million+ copies now. Imagine it. They don't have a board or investors that will run off with the money. Indies games are the only games we should ever support. Really.
@@hpmc7426 agreed, although I'd say Indie dev's that have shown to ship games. Lots and lots of scummy scammers out there too.
disastrous launches were already common before NMS... the difference is that they didn't just tell the customers to fuck off but stayed with it
Exactly
Hello Games is a team from 16 years ago, it's a shame that the entire industry is failing so massively that the past beats them harder than their parents should have.
I think you are right that passion is part of the reason why NMS is so good.
The other part is because they are a small company. Quick google search says they've sold 10-12 million copies, and have a staff of 20-40 people. $60 USD cost of the game means they have made enough money to host 900 staff for 10 years (assuming no other costs and 80k a year pay), yet they only have 20-40. I know that's just rough math but the margins they are working within shows why they have such an advantage. They succeed where AAA companies fail because they do not outgrow themselves, because they are not chasing ever increasing profit. They are not trying to release a game every few years. They can take the time to push free updates and keep them free. They are chasing their passion and the realization of their dream game because there is no corpo bs.
I do not expect much from AAA anymore, but I'm quietly optimistic whenever I hear about a small studio doing something ambitious, because they have the freedom from corporate greed and corporate expectations to do so.
I've had enough about people talking about "Sean's lies" I know those sound like it but they were promises, the guy knew all the posibilities "The Formula" would be able to create but didn't have the time to complete it. When you talk to Sean you understand he's a genius! but you also realise he isn't entirely cut to be the one talking to media.
You said something about the passion and that there's no microtransactions or DLCs that cost you money but we also need to mention the Expeditions, those aren't just more content or expansions, those are proof they really want people to play their game while showing you aspects of the game that you could have missed between updates.
I think its beautiful how they reward you with very cool things just by playing the expeditions and those are free.
He quite literally LIED about the game. He LIED about what features the game had. He even lied about it being a multiplayer game when it was releasing as a singleplayer game. He LIED.
@@OCinneide Yep, he lied.
He wanted to make a sandbox exploration game on a large scale, with good enough basic structure to expand upon for years. The promise itself was so good, that Sony got involved. So Sony provided the full AAA package of publicity and box price, while setting up a surreal release date. All that for an indie company of about ~8 people at the time. They had noone to handle the press, so the overly introverted Sean took it upon himself. I believe that was his only mistake in the whole story. Handling the media. He was led into corners in every interview, visibly uncomfortable and anxious, he obviously couldn't be honest, because Sony was involved with pretty strict arrangements.
So yea, Sean lied. What a monster.
I like No man's sky because they keep updating it, and they do not call it a "Free DLC" like other companies do to trick people into thinking the company is a good company for releasing a "free DLC" like the god of war "free DLC" is just a story update
Any kind of _update_ that introduces content (not just bugfixes, which would be a _patch_) is a DLC by definition. NMS updates are free DLCs just the same as Path of Exile updates are free DLCs (to an already free game in that case).
That said, I'm not sure how exactly does giving a free DLC for God of War makes the company look bad, specially when God of War was a huge success anyway, nothing to hate them for. Where is the trick?
@@csenky It's not about the technicality, but the way it's marketed. Just calling it an update just sounds so much more appealing to me as a customer. I'd probably find it annoying if GGG kept saying "The free Settlers of Kalguur DLC", "The free Conquerors of the Atlas DLC" etc.
Dont diss God of War Valhalla lil boy
@@Zacynoodles Watch your tounge boy. I was in the ukrianian armed forces since 2014. If anything, you compared to me are the "lil boy"
Insert mandatory "why the frick does this channel only hawe 514 subscribers ?!?" here. This is genuinely a very well produced and interresting video. Thank you! Subbed.
As a strict VR gamer, who has hours in NMS clocked tenfold more than the next one, I concur.. it’s a lightning in a bottle. An anomaly. An exception. A true work of art. 💙
What nms was like on release is roughly what I expected, minus the bugs, maybe a little less. It was developed by a team of 4 people for majority of it, they were a tiny studio, and aside from things brought up in interviews, he was relatively consistent about the core stuff. I was relatively happy with it on release, except the bugs. But what it is now is WILD. Its AMAZING. I do wish they had a fully offline, single player version still, the lonely exploration captured by the game a year into release has never really returned as a possibility. But it is an AMAZING game and achievement
I don't think it's *just* "passion".
One big part is that the only shareholders to make happy are the employees of Hello Games themselves. I bet every dev would have loved to fix the games that were released in a broken state, but their bosses are beholden to the shareholders and those bought shares because they want stock yields - this year, not next year or later. Also, Hello Games is a comparatively small studio and the ones calling the shots are IN that same studio. Small teams can be a lot more flexible while also requiring a lot less money to function so one big success makes so much cash that you can keep the studio running for a long time. There's downsides to that as well though: all those updates (mostly) included small additions and adjustments. Like a whole update that makes some planets purple and has a new type of randomized ship. An update with like 10 underwater base building parts (and a short repetitive quest to introduce them). The flora and fauna have mostly been the same for years at this point. Small teams just can't make a ton of changes in a short period of time.
People compare version 1.0 of No Man's Sky with today's version but they forget that this was 8 years ago at this point. Of course a big publisher with millions to blow *could* theoretically fix their game and add tons of stuff in a year's time, but this is where the inflexibility of large teams comes into play which effectively throws a wrench into those plans. This is also the reason why Bethesda has these weird open worlds where somehow bizarrely hardly anything is actually interconnected and player's choices often result in a differently colored flag, a dead NPC that was irrelevant for anything else - or absolutely nothing happening other than a check mark in the quest log and 100 more gold in the purse. They "fixed" the large team issue by making a huge world map and then let their quest designers go wild in their own tiny little world of quest-specific NPCs - but you can't make any big impacts, otherwise the quest designers would keep shooting each other in the foot. Which is a stark contrast to New Vegas where seemingly every second quest leads to or impacts another quest and those quests can give you hidden perks, send assassins after you and change the endgame in various ways (including the choice of wiping out possibly the biggest minor faction in the game).
Passion was important, but they're also in a very unique position compared to the majority of other studios: being mostly independent from the publisher while having a ton of cash reserves from a very successful (in financial terms at least) launch.
This is all true, Sean Murray is the co founder of Hello Games so the passion trickled down from the top. As to where the bigger publishers don't have someone like Sean in charge. They also, like you said, have shareholders. And the only passion in the shareholders and CEOs of these large companies have is for money.
dunno dont feel that too much, give too much excuse to big publishers, basically saying hello games could only do it cause they are so small. Sean even had to sell his frikcing house.
@@Dirty_Davos Publishers don't make games, they just pay for them. There's absolutely nothing stopping a publisher planning and financing a game with a small team to be released in six years with a defined focus. The need for big teams is only there because of short-term greed. Nothing here excuses anything on the publisher side.
I think people hating on no man's sky is overall bad and distasteful. Hello games was a small indie studio with less than 25 people working on it at first, and they expanded to 100 about 2 years after release, they got in the limelight and crumbled under pressure, but they pulled through. You cannot compare the mistakes of a originally small indie studio to the massive greedy corporations that would have done the same even if no man's sky was not in the picture. The problem is mostly c suite greed, the fact that a game needs to release in a financial year even if it's not ready to please shareholders, underfunding development, forcing them to stupid decisions as retrofitting engines or interfering with art directions, and the endless stories of c suite people prioritizing their own stock options and bonuses rather than funding the game development. No man's is a good example of a studio trying to right their wrongs, and make their game better and better through passion, as you pointed out at 13:30
Passion. If they didnt fix it the company was done they didnt have a choice. And it still sucks. The only people who say otherwise difnt have a problem with it in the beginning. You’re not a reliable source. The reliable sources moved on a long time ago.
Games have a much longer lifespan in this decade than they did in decades past. Skyrim’s relevance, in my opinion, lasted nearly ten years. The lifespan of MMOs is even longer. While I definitely DO NOT think it is okay for studios to misrepresent what their games will be able to do at launch, I do think we’re in an era where the first release of long-lifetime games will feel more like a tech demo, and they’ll grow into their potential over a period of years. The other model for this phenomenon is Star Citizen, which is taking the alternate route of staying in alpha/beta forever.
They're making money because more and more people keep buying the game at a steady pace. Its not tethered to the launch week business model. It's easily the best value per dollar on steam. And I payed full price for it at launch. Good product, fair price will always win. Also it feels like an appreciating asset. It keeps getting better. Not to mention the gazillion hours of free advertising from streamers and UA-camrs.
I bought this game at launch. Played a few dozen hours and then sat on it for years until last week. Now a hundred hours in and still going hard. It’s a good time to get into the game
Since the last update of No Man's Sky, I've been playing the game almost every day. It's really become incredibly good and is a lot of fun. I had no expectations of the game and after many years I was still immensely impressed by it.
A thing you forgot is that those big companies have investors and they have to keep investors happy. Investors don't want to see numbers in red, even though games development requires you to dip into the red from time to time. And only after a long time of investment do games reap rewards, something that no investor will ever understand, or want to understand.
I'm not saying investors are evil because they do what they do. It's just that their way of thinking about how to make money is just purely incompatible with the videogames industry, how we value dedication and passion in the face of making no money at all. And how we reward those companies we like with a purchase.
Hello games wanted to make No Man's Sky amazing, and when they failed on release they probably panicked, not because of the money, but because they didn't deliver on the universe they wanted to make. So they said "I'm going to fix this no matter how long it takes!" and they did. And it worked. They made a mistake and they had the drive to fix it and make it into the game they wanted to play.
Other AAA studios missed that. What they saw was a game that sucked that still got a *lot* of sales because they said "we'll fix it later." So they started telling their devs to just copy NMS and release a half baked game. But in this case when the devs panic, it's not because they didn't make a good game, they panic because their game bombing means that they could lose funding or get fired. When the devs say "I'm going to fix this no matter how long it takes." The CEOs lean and say "Well actually no you're not because we aren't gunna "waste" our money on that. It's your fault you didn't successfully trick the community like NMS did."
The AAA studios completely missed the point and have forgotten that passion and love for your project actually makes a difference and that the players can tell when it's there.
I really liked the way you told the story, what actually kept me watching the video was your way to present the info. Thanks ! I subscribe.
Thank you!
This video's got great production values. Always cool to find a new channel that you think has the potential to blow up. Keep at it!
No hate just my opinion. These kinds of releases have been happening since forever and while it is a huge problem with the industry, claiming it was no man's sky's fault that that happens is ridiculous.
I agree. There is a big difference between independent studios releasing games in early access and triple A studios releasing unfinished products. The first big difference is the pricing. Even No Man Sky is frequently on sale for $30. Most early access games are clearly marked as such and are priced low.
Exactly,comparing AAA games who have access to endless resources and tens ,if not hundreds of developers to a game feveloped by a small team is a bit unfair,specially when AAA games have no excuse to be released in such terrible states we see them at launch
I bought NMS a couple of years ago when it went on a big special for few bucks since I finally realised they had VR support and thought "that could look cool". I played maybe a couple of days, got bored of grinding the base building mission.... thinking this game is going nowhere, and noped out a couple more years. Coincidentally, earlier this year I picked it up again, thought "hey this isn't half bad now" and then just a couple of months into me playing it casually they dropped the new update..
As a software (not game) dev that has spent decades refining and building on the same massive piece of software, I'm not used to seeing the same thing in the gaming industry with rare exception (eve online). I can REALLY appreciate a game developer that's willing to stick with it, not screw their fans, "make good", ... AND deliver a jaw dropping game. That takes commitment and grit. I know.
The reason nms has become the posterboy of zero to hero, is because they're the only developers at the time that actually gave a crap about the community. The thing that the general public who either didn't play the game or played it and it didn't scrtach the itch didn't know, was that there was a huge fanbase that kept playing the game after launch and continued to support it because even in the first 6 months, the game was an anomaly that didn't exist anywhere else. Any person with an imagination completely fell in love with it, and could see the base for something truly special. Once they added VR, it became the greatest achievement and experience I'd ever had in my 30+ years of gaming. It became the experience I had been waiting for from gaming.
The pointing fingers and screams of lies could in turn be pointed back at the interviews and interviewees. The 70 questions interview alone has responses that are ambiguous. He's responding in regards to game at present in development that was constantly changing. And the anger towards the trailer I can understand, but aren't most trailers built to sell the product?
For me hello games are a shinning light in a rotten industry who stood by a creation they were proud of and continue to make even better. And because they simply will not accept money, I bought the last campfire as a way of saying thank you for making a game that I'd dreamt of.
So I think zero to hero isn't the correct way to evaluate hello games and nms. I think a small dev team dreamed big and delivered, so in my book they were already heroes.
Well said!
7 years ago, I bought a ps4 just to play no man’s sky. I quickly lost interest in the game and pretty much forgot about it. A week ago, I stumbled on some of the hype around the worlds release and booted up the game for the first time in years starting from the very beginning. To say I was blown away is an understatement! It was the most engaging opening hours of a game I’ve played in years. The design is brilliant how it gives you just enough objectives to learn the mechanics of the game before releasing you to explore the near infinite universe.
My guy, I have no idea how you can list out the problem with the game industry, hold up one company as an example and yet miss the target of the cause all in 15 mins. It's not _"passion"_ or lack of passion why the game industry is doing this, it's the fact that Game Developers are OWNED by Publishing companies, who set the budgets and time tables for these development studios. They have contractual obligations to meet release dates.
This didn't used to be the thing. the relationship actually was the inverse for the longest time, where Publishers were at the behest of the Developer, and the Developer dictated to the publisher as to when they are ready, and the publisher basically was just the marketing people, and the folks that printed the cartridges, and later the disks and got them into stores.
THAT IS NOT HOW IT IS ANYMORE. Publishers are the ones that dictate to Developers, and often times even set the projects. This is why it's attracted some of the most dog sh*t tier practices. And btw, if you want to know WHO was the first to start doing this, and more over the person that invented it. The company was EA, and the man John Riccitiello. There are many who don't know who this man is, and others who are well versed in who this man is. To those that don't. This man has had more of an effect in the games you play, even if said game wasn't an EA game, than ANY other person on the planet. This A**hole created policy, that other game publishers emulated because they saw the apparent success of EA. "If EA can do it, why can't we.", The problem? Is that it was all a f**king fraud. EA wasn't successful because the policies worked. EA just engaged in creative accounting to make it seem that way. EA would purchase development studios, and add the "projected value" of said studio based on their historical "pre EA" performance to EA's total value, this causing stock prices to go up, because the excitement and perception that EA has this famous developer that made "X franchise", and so it pumped their stock values up, and thus their perceived value as a whole.
Anyone who has been a fan of certain developers before EA bought them, know what I mean. The "Pre-EA" games are great, the "Post-EA" games, Mid to dogsh*t. EA would hide the losses in their other investments, then keep doing the same thing over and over. Anyone with a brain can immediately see the problem here. That this is an unsustainable business practice, because eventually all the studios will be bought, and the "rob peter to pay paul" move won't work. And guess what, that's exactly what happened, EA, Activision, Blizzard and a bunch of other publishers, fucking caved in. a bunch of studios completely dissolved, employees either laid off or more often, consolidated into new studios made up of the bunch of studios. The publishers citing that various "efficiency and cost cutting measures" as if it was always in the plans to do this. A massive consolidation of the industry. various legislation for more stern enforcement of non-competes and NDAs.
Now flash forward to today, were those sh*tty practices, combined with the political slant IE 'woke' appeasement, has driven these publishers even further into the ground. Now you have lay offs happening by the 10's of thousands at a time.
The one saving grace, the declaration by the FTC that, the previously rigidness of the non-competes and NDAs was strangling the industry (which it was), and thus the repeal of them. Allowing all these people to start forming independent companies again, and THIS time, they have learned the lesson of being very careful about taking publisher money and allow themselves to be bought out.
So to you point about why Hello Games was able to pull this off while others aren't. It's because Hello Games isn't owned by a publisher, they work WITH publishers but not owned BY a publisher. That's why, that and due to their small team size and efficient team they are able to finance free update after free update. If they were owned by a publisher, said publisher would have told them to move onto the next project long ago.
As far as Sean Murray, yeah the dude lied. Big time and he's an a**hole for doing it, no excuse. However I also know that during one of those presentations at E3 he was publicly humiliated, like the dude was trembling it was that bad. I think he took that to heart, went back to the studio and put himself on a mission to fix the game, rather than embrace the sweet release of a deadman's necktie, if you catch my meaning. So I'll give him credit for cleaning up his own mess, a mess that HE DID create.
But I am not going to hang the industry failures and practices on this one man or one company. Especially since such practices were already in play before Murray ever took to a stage. I will place the blame, on the one man and one company that STARTED the practices, and who DO deserve the blame. Though, I will also blame the idiots at the other publishers who in turn emulated it, and upon seeing their failing performance, didn't stop immediately to ask, "Why wasn't it working?" I think if they did, instead of doubling down, EA's "fraud" would have come to light sooner.
I say this as someone who used to work in the industry and watched it turn into this absolute embarrassment that it has. Chiefly due to it's piss-poor management and "administration" NOT the developers.
this comment is written better than the video
I think you absolutely nailed it. It's passion. No big developer has it. All they want is money, and time and again we stupidly give it to them.
On the topic of "how are they making money"
They made the money when it sold like absolute mad. Many refunds were issued, but many more weren't. The salaries of every employee are paid for decades. The way they did it was by actually using the ridiculous profit to pay their employees rather than mega million bonuses for the C suite.
No Mans Sky was made by a relatively small team, and while it may not have been the generation defining masterpiece many expected it was still a wildly popular game. Millions of copies have been sold, and sales have continued in the 2020's as more and more updates continue to expand the appeal of the game.
The money has already been made. Why does it need to be a continual trickle when they got a lump sum up front?
I think its the same situation with ConcernedApe. He just made millions and now he keeps updating the game for free because thats what he wants to do.
Add to that upfront sum the huge boost in sales with every free update and you realize that those free updates pay for themselves a thousand times over
Between Bethesda and NMS the entire industry now just assumes they can drop complete crap and fix it later and the fans will not only forgive them but call it an epic comeback.
Sean Murray at the end of the day was the villain that got away with it.
lol, but could he and his studio have survived if they only released today?
I was playing Starfield, but kinda got bored when I proceeded through the alternate universes. Because of everything you covered in this video, I'm downloading No Man's Sky right now, so Thanks for that.
Bought on release day, dissapointed with the rest of planet Earth, uninstalled it. I bought my Quest VR head set a litter over year later and was looking for something emersive. I was told by a friend that NMS is worth the purchase now so I re-installed it and was astounded by all the improvements. I love all things SciFi so when I put my VR gear on and was able to BE the Traveler, I was like OMG, this was my #1 VR experience game to date.
No man sky were manage to fix because they weren't made by a corporation. They made a lot of money by launching this game in it unfinished conditions. And spent a lot of it to fix it and clean his name. For a Bethesda or a cd project red, shareholders would prefer their company loosing their reputation than spending millions of dollars fixing it
CD Projekt have a pretty good track record for fixing their blunders. Not such a great track record for avoiding blunders in the first place, but credit where it's due.
Till this day NMS still has the best economy loop to exploit and get rich PRETTY DAMN FAST.
It gets much faster if you already have a freighter simply due to the cargo space capacity.
1. Gather chlorine
2. Duplicate chlorine using oxygen (or the mobile refinery duplication glitch if you're lazy)
ideally you want at least a whole stack of 999 units of Cl
3. find a system that sells chlorine
4. sell all of your chlorine
5. the market gets flooded with your chlorine and immediately crashes going from something between +2%/ -2% price to something like -70%
6. buy back all of your chlorine dirt cheap + all of the chlorine they already had
7. find another system that sells chlorine, repeat 4-6.
8. continue repeating steps 3-6 until your units come in billions.
Important thing is to sell as whole and not as stacks cause if you sell as stacks after first stack you're losing money, but you can just sell entire stock in one go, all for one price.
It should take like one session of playing. Eventually you can speed up the process by finding another element that has a reasonably high price and is reasonably uncommon so that you can double your chance of selling in any given system.
as per the mobile refinery glitch - you can just put 10 mobile refineries without moving mouse once in one and the same spot, so that they overlap, put a stack of something in it, and then destroy all of the refineries to gain 10 stacks of what you put in back. The game treats it like they all had the same thing inside and upon destruction it returns you what it thinks was inside.
If it's easy money you want, just tick the box in the options menu that makes everything free :)
The come back is real and theway sean fixed this game …. Speechless.
No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk are both made by people who want to make something cool, who are passionet for the game and consequently has the game this "Soul", if it doesn't have this "Soul" then there is nothing to fix.
Great video. I'm one of the newly persuaded. still figuring things out but I'm having a lot of fun. can't wait to discover more.
Welcome aboard!
No Man's Sky got fixed and will continue to get updated forever because Hello Games can actually afford to do it. Hello Games has a net income of around $45 million USD for (probably) less than 10 shareholders (only guessing, its a private company founded by 4 people). Its a tiny company of only 45 employees, so they only have to sell about 90000 copies of the game per year to break even. And even if sales fully dried up tomorrow, their passion project could continue to be supported by coasting on the company's equity for another 30 years. They got rich real fast and they are using that money to make the game they always wanted to make. They don't need to expand their business to make more money. They don't need to make new games to make more money. They already have all the money they will ever need.
True artist working for their passion.
Shaun murry has the greatest redemption arc in all of human history
It's not passion, you're vastly underestimating how passionate some studios are about what they make. It's often bad management.
That too
Most developers are passionate but the management needs to be as well, Hello Games has that and most AAA games don't.
I bought NMS a few weeks ago as one of the 'must-have' games to play with a PSVR2 headset. Obviously there is a bit of a drop-off between the quality of graphics achievable on the PSVR2 and what you get on PC or PS5. But holy sh-t, the immersive nature of this game is something else. It's taken me about 10-12 sessions (1-2hrs each) to master most of the basic commands and menus and stuff - just visited the anomaly. So I have barely scratched the surface. I also really appreciate the Awakenings quest which gives you a bunch of objectives to teach you most of the core gameplay.
But I'm addicted. Putting on the headset and wandering around on an alien planet, surrounded by moons and stars and other planets is genuinely what I was hoping for as a kid many years ago from video games. It feels like living in the future. Jet-packing into an ocean and swimming around, then standing up with the surface lapping around your helmet. It's insane. And looking at the menus and logs, I haven't even seen 95% of what the game offers.
I remember reading about this game at launch and thinking it sounded quite dull. But 26 updates later.... it's an incredible experience. So thanks to Sean Murray and Hello Games. The dude had a vision. Just took him 8 years to fully realise it.
The practice of releasing unfinished games actually started with patches. When the internet actually became a thing, patching games became ubiquitous fairly shortly thereafter.
Yes, patches existed before as well (in the discs provided in gaming magazines) but they were far less common and usually addressed very big issues.
I guess I am saying how old I am, but back in the day... like in the 80's when computers started to come out for the C64 and the likes, you bought the game, and that was it. If there was a bug - you had to figure out how to play around it. Games came in a box, with a really big game manual... Those were the days....
The problem is that the big AAA studios are so focused on profits, with accountants and shareholders on their back (as well as upper management bonuses reliant on sales performance), that it makes more financial sense to cut and run rather than to work it into a good game.
Really well made video. Was entertaining the whole way through
damn, you're incredibly underrated for such high quality content
everything from editing to discussion topics and pacing is very on point, i was really surprized that you don't have hundreds of thousands of subs by now with how good it is! i bet it's only a matter of short time till you find your audience, keep up the good work mate!!!
Thank you, I put some time into this and have a few more ideas for other videos already!
I totally agree with you mate
NMS is as much an experience and a community as it is a game.
Free update after free update has finally gone far beyond the original hype and delivered so much more than any of us ever thought possible.
OK so it's not an edge of your seat fps, an action packed whatever or a convoluted story driven jrpg. NMS isn't for everyone and that's fine by me and clearly thousands of other players who have spent hundreds of hours chilling, exploring and building across a game so vast we will never be able to see it all.
I was one of those players who was disappointed at launch but thankfully I kept dipping back into the game and now years later I still find it my go to relaxation space and honestly can't believe how much content Hello Games have added without asking for a single penny more.
UPDATE: Tango is back from the dead! Sadly they don't have the Redfall IP but the publisher that bought em got Hi-Fi Rush!
Good news that the devs get to keep doing what they love!
cyberpunk's bugs with that epic music always cracks me up till this date.
The main problem remains, the game is very very shallow, there's a lot of systems and things "to do" but every aspect, be it combat, exploration or building is poor gameplay wise.
Well the launch was obviously a disaster, but the concept itself has always intruiged me so im happy it got better.
I waited to buy it until a month ago. I could not be happier with my purchase so far.
Why do i enjoy digging a tunnel through the planet so much
Do you sing "Diggy Diggy Hole" in a bad Scottish accent while you're doing it? Or is that just me?
@@bartolomeothesatyr Not just you.
I first played this game in 2020 around the release of origins and the next generation updates, don't remember the specifics. A homie and I played and got about 80hrs deep before losing interest. I just picked it up again and have been loving it. There's an interview I came across recently with Sean and he mentioned they have no plans of slowing down even with their new title in production.
Never in my life have I thought to reach out to the team who made a game, but, I've been in awe of what I've witnessed over the years. I had to get in contact just to say thank you to the Hello Games team who have made one of my favorite games. I'm so confident they won't be making the same mistake that I'll absolutely be pre-ordering their new game, it looks awesome.
Unbelievable comeback. Been 4-5 years since i played. Today i suddenly was wondering about the game. Watched a few videos and was stunned. The new game looking very interesting aswell. Big respect.
Great commentary and structure. Your imagery flows well with what you are saying. This is obviously a labor of love for you. Keep it up!! You have my subscription. Keep it coming.
That is quiet a controversial theorie. Games came out in an absolutly broken state way before No Mans Sky. Alien Colonial Marines would be a prime example for that.
Never forget TotalBiscuits final piece of wisdom:
STOP PREORDERING VIDEO GAMES
It wasn't just NMS that did this. FFXIV did too, at the same time. The two pulling this off at the same time in two very different gamespaces is probably what created this effect. Had it been just NMS, I don't think it would have been as impactful.
I have never seen any content pop up on FFXIV yet alone heard about a comeback. I think the NMS impact is substantially greater
I think FFXIV is niche enough that it didn’t get as much mass ridicule and criticism from lots of mainstream sources like NMS.
@GamerBoyRobby neither have I 🤷♂️
@@realspiritseekers it is "niche" in the sense that it's an MMO and the content/player base tends to be isolated from the rest of the community, but the literal 10s of millions of players now from a game that was as lowly rated as NMS and damn near toppled SquareEnix and DID dethrone WoW as the king of MMOs, isn't something to overlook in this conversation.
@@GamerBoyRobby if you show interest in MMOs, the Algorithms aren't going to show them to you.
I like a lot of the game, but I spend too much time in inventory management and material hunting. That's 90% of the game time, and that's not what I want to spend my time on.
I've played this game in it's release, then again in 2018, again in 2020, 2022 and I am now playing again in 2024. Seeing this game grow was amazing and I love every single thing about it. I wish all the money in the world to Hello Games lol
About the money aspect of NMS. The developers have stated that every time they update the game the sales of NMS increase. On top of that comparatively their day to day costs are rather low since as an indie studio they don't have as many expenses as a AAA studio. So the sales of the base game which always rise whenever a new (always good) update comes out makes up for the cost of making said update. So as Sean Murray said as long as that's the case they could and very well would like to update/develop NMS forever.
I am learning crucial information in the comments here.
Friend bought it on release. Tried to get me to buy it. Thought it was shit said no, year later found it on sale for $15 figured I can give it a shot. Played it for a day, put it down for years. Got a random crave to play it with that friend a couple years ago. Been hooked ever since
it gets like that sometimes
I had this weird misconception that no man’s sky was basically space tarkov. I know there is a space Tarkov but I wish I knew the different sooner.
Are you thinking of the marauders?
You make really high quality videos for such a small channel, wish you the best in growing it!
Paid 70€ for the first PS4 release of NMS, was expensive but I had a blast with the game, cuz I didn't saw any of the interviews and hype growing around the game. And then came the updates, and it was brilliant, awesome. Now after 26 updates, I had many emotional roller coaster so now I don't really care, but Shawn delivered, where all the other studios who tried to do like them didn't. Great video!
I wish well to this small channel, an I am glad to say that I am an OG subscriber (subbed before 100) lol😂
Thank you! 🙌
All these streamers. However it's your video that showed me the light. Time to redownload this game for the first time in 4 years.
I got NMS at ps4 launch, never gave up, stuck by it and alwysd tried to show others the true game that was there, glad so many are learning the joys of this world... Now Hello games is not indie in the sense so many think it is, more like AA rating for a studio, they have about 30ish people there and about 150ish British pounds in net money... So far from broke, many of the people there hold other spots in other studios (I think) but they are definitely passionate in what they do there and as a team they build each other up....
Passion Projects, Always Pull through.
(They pull through, because out of spite, the passion to mould ones own imagination into something tangible lives on indefinitely - till the dream is made a reality.)
If it is not a passion Project, It’s never worth it ❤
Yup, that's the difference in the intention alright. There's a difference between "I WANT to make that game, but I have failed and am unable at the time and I have to release it to get food today", which is the story of NMS, giving it the resources to realize the dream after the fact. And between "I am an executive and I want to hype the game up to the stars but spend the least amount of money as possible, so that we get lots of presales, take the money and then go on to the next thing."
Love the game. Only issue for me now is I feel like I'm constantly playing a new game plus mode. I completed storylines etc. but I feel it needs a proper ending where credits roll. Just for that sense of achievement. Then if you want to go back in where you left off you can. I'm now just going in when there is an expedition and then when complete I go back to my save and it feels kind of empty with no real objectives. I often feel I want to start again from the start when there is a decent update but then I have stuff I just can't be bothered doing again thrown in and I'm torn between wanting to play and forcing myself to play.
I know that feeling but two weeks ago i finally started a new safe. With custom difficulty that it's not such a grind again to get to a decent progress and all i can say i never had such a great time in nms.
No man’s sky is my favorite game of all time. I got it into it hit Xbox and I still have it since.
I dont think sean lied. I think he didnt realize how much work it would be to do such a thing by the deadline sony gave them. sony screwed a very small time and then blamed them for the bad release basically. I think they did everything and more they wanted to do and kept their promises. it took a while but it happened.
and EA and all those other larger studios dont care. they just wanna crank out more games cause "demand" when that demand isnt what others want. they want good carefully crafted games.
I wisll die on the NMS hill. I have since its release because I KNEW it would be a good game. I knew they were gonna make it into an breathtaking adventure. did I play it for the entire time? nope. I waited patiently. then came back. but I knew it would always get better. and I will die on the hill.. or planet, that is nms.
I wrote a few paragraphs talking about how it changed my life in this comment but I realized that’s way too much no one would read. So I’ll keep it short. It changed my life. Only learned about it about two years ago or so and since then I’ve never been the same.
I think Sean’s fiscal responsibility and ethics has a lot to do with Hello Games’ success. He made a ton of money but didn’t waste it. He saved for the future of the game and the studio. ❤ to Sean.
Hello Games did not have miles of red tape. This is why they managed to do it and others cannot. Hello games stayed completely fucking SILENT for entire months while the ship was on fire. There is no AAA studio anywhere that would have that meeting where they decide to go full hermits but at the same time keep working on a failed product.
I think NMS, Minecraft and maybe some more games are moving us into a new age of "Indefinite games" where a developer is small enough and a game is popular enough that it's profits can sustain developers indefinitely by just purchases by new customers. There is enough kids getting into gaming for that.
I think in terms of the evolution of games and publishers promising "more later", it's not only No Man's Sky that's to blame for that.
The first game that comes to my mind for that is Warframe.
Warframe also started relatively small and feature-bare, but the difference (the most important difference, at least) was that it didn't over-promise.
Warframe also had a Founders' program and an in-game store, but I think at this stage NMS business model is "Just keep adding stuff and hope people will buy it THIS time".
This isn't naive or wishful thinking, IMHO, I think it's necessary because the devs know that their whole reputation going forward is staked on NMS' success, and thus its fans.
3:37 a lot of people think that in those interviews, Sean Murray was describing the game he wanted to make, not the game his studio had since he wasn't used to being held to his words as the head of an indie studio
This game in VR is now more immersive and jaw-dropping than Half-Life Alyx. That's saying something.
So playing a non-VR game in a VR mode that is still meant to be played sitting is somehow more immersive than a game that is specially built for VR, with a lot of interactivity, without a need for any menu (the menus in NMS don't bother me but in VR oh god), that plays with your ability to take any items, open every drawer, amazing shooting mechanics, and DAMN the whole chapter with the blind monster was amazing. Played Half-life: Alyx twice, almost wanted to play it a third time but now I know the game, but NMS in VR I find it not as impressive. Except the exonefs, driving them in VR is so good compared to the crappy borderlands car driving system, and the game is still beautiful, VR or not.
For me there’s just a peace with getting in my ship, flying out of the atmosphere… and going anywhere. Hit the next galaxy, land on the next planet without a cut scene… it’s an escape. I adore it.
Dude actually released the game and built the game afterwards. Looks like turns have tabled a little but they managed to fix it. So yeah
So does that make us investors?
@@realspiritseekers We practically paid out the OG investors to make sure the game was finished. (Against our will)
You say that like it was a laudable achievement.