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!!!)
@@threshious 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.
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
@@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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 😎😎👍👍
@@threshious 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. 😉
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
All they need now is the Star Ocean update. Where you find a world with medieval levels of tech, and crash on it, with a laser rifle becoming the "Hero of Light"
No Man's Sky succeeds because they get a new wave of sales after every major update. But they are also small enough to still have a clear vision. AAA Studios...not so much. Big Corporate needs don't always mesh well with developer's visions. And sometimes you get Todd Howard.
Great video essay that convinced me to give NMS a try. I agree with basically everything you said except I think there is a silver lining in that studios know they can fix bad games after release and feel a level of responsibility to do so, nowadays. I just want to say that this practice of games releasing in an unfinished state was talked about when Minecraft came out, too, and back then people referred to it as the infinite beta. Which is not to say you're wrong, rather that the industry has been moving in this direction even before NMS.
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.
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.
@@GreenSabre187 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 ***LOVE*** NMS. I got my first gaming console in 1983. Yep. I'm that old. I dreamed that one day there would be a game like NMS. So I was as excited as many, as disappointed as anyone else when it came out. And as happy as can be with what it is today. My favourite game of all time.
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.
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. 💙
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.
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
Imagine if Sean Murray walked out and said: Now hear me out. The game is going to kinda suck at first but if you buy the game day one and be patient for the next 8 years we promise we'll deliver something truly magical.😅 He would have delivered that much has proven to be true, but would you have invested? 🤔
12:18 "How was 'Hello Games' able to pull this off as an indie studio?" They made 40 million dollars in the first month of release, with a broken-ass game. 😐 With a team of 10 people. So in theory, it should finance them for _years._
Yeah, they were an indie studio that somehow produced AAA sales. I do think they largely believed in their own hype, rather than intending to deceive but ran out of time and money to deliver it. Sales of Joe Danger can only get you so far! But hey I ploughed most of the time that I've played the game on that initial version and still loved it. They oversold it in the interviews they gave, but that core promise from the initial trailers that if you see it, you can travel to it, was there from day one and was what got me on board. Funny to see the original version after all these years. Like going back to previous gen games and realising the games that seemed cutting edge then now look like junk, but at the time it delivered on that sense of wonder and exploration. I revisit it from time to time and marvel at all the new additions. I might put a bit more time into the latest update as I've started a new save and with all the updates it's sort of like playing No Man's Sky 2!
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.
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.
For cyberpunk specifically, there were whispers around launch that the studio wanted to delay it for another year, but they had contractual obligations to the polish government, who had partially funded the game, to release it when they did and they wouldn’t budge.
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.
The bad release of NMS wasn't entirely Hello Games fault. Sony is about 70% to blame for the bad and rushed launch. Sony forced a timeline and Sean and the team had ideas but they did not have enough time to do them. To me I see the interviews as "we are working on these things" more than "these are in the game right now". Not to mention the lawsuits and the flood they had to recover from. And I don't think NMS is the main cause of incomplete release syndrome, if anything I think it was the first victim of a rushed launch by Publishers. Bethesda and its buggy releases are probably more of a cause of what started the whole "its ok to release a unfinished game" mentality more than anything. Even if the games were completed they still had major game breaking bugs that are still in the games to this day, most of which the community had to fix for them. NMS is a outlier among incomplete games and one that had the right people to fix the game and were willing to fix the game with NO MOTIVE FOR MONEY. Also in my opinion NMS is an indie game not a AAA game. Just because Sony picked them up for the launch doesn't mean that they got much of Sony's support.
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.
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.
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
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.
I came into NMS shortly after the initial release. I didn't mind not being able to interact with others because I am largely a solo player anyway. But I loved the size, and the ability to just head out "thattaway" and explore without end. I recall the first time seeing another player. (Two actaully. They were just sparkles of light, and were talking to each other, but could not hear me.) But then came a slew of other improvements, the Nexus and a chance to REALLY see other players, better detailed worlds, bases, settlements, freighters, outlaw, living ships. Too mcuh to mention, really. I found it a worth while game even in the early, aweful days. And now it is, at times, simply glorious. Well done, Hello 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.
@@threshious 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.
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.
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 RUclipsrs.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Hello games doesn't have to pay multiple redundant CEO's with bloated salaries, boards of directors, marketing execs, and teams of psychologists figuring out ways to "trick you" into pulling out your credit card. The studio simply cannot be compared to most AAA studios that are owned by corporate conglomerates. Even if it never existed, major AAA studios would still release unfinished games, because they can. Because people buy them anyway.
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
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.
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 ❤
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.
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.
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.
Yeah that's what I take issue with as well.... There's those huge companies that make shitty games and never even attempt to fix them or promise future updates just to drop them again. Nms had a fail launch and broken promises, sure we can all agree there. But they're consistently updated and shown how stubborn they are at bringing the game to where they want it to be! They haven't even made any dlcs meanwhile Skyrim has 3 versions and paid mods (and updates on 10 year old games that doesn't change shit other than break mods) I mean Bethesda haven't even proved to fix bugs in their games that's been there since the start, but depend on the community fixing their mistakes for them.... So NMS never started a trend about releasing half finished games, shit like that was there beforehand and have continued. Nms have proved it's possible to get a comeback if you consistently work on actually fixing the broken promises and focus on evolving
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
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.
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.
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 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!
I came back after 2 years to NMS because of the latest update, and had the same questions in the back of my mind about Shawn, and Hello Games, ¿How the fack do they stay delivering wonders for the same initial price, and even instead of killing their flagship game, still infuse great life in it as they reveal another game that will use the tech they developed for NMS? and yep, that's the answer: PASSION in their soul for what they do.
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.
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!!!
Have over 1000hrs in the game and it's genuinely the sort of thing my young mind wanted back when I was on my 16-Bit home computer. Even today, NMS isn't perfect, but it's little foibles and issues I can handle. It's just such a wonderful thing to play.
There is only 1 Solar system. That is the "Sol" system, which is the PLANETARY SYSTEM around our star aka "Sol" aka the sun. Other stars have "PLANETARY SYSTEMS" around them. The more you know...
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.
How Hello Games makes money: Small team with low overhead (compared to a big AAA studio), viral marketing instead of expensive ads & sponsorships, and drawing in more sales with each update (I've bought the game twice so far, once on PS4 and again on Steam, and gotten friends to buy it too).
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.
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.
I feel like you've identified the primary reasons why I only played a few hours of NMS prior to this latest patch update you mention. My feelings after only 30 hours of irl play time, is that NMS is certainly worth a second or third look. With the release of so many AAA titles that make promises that aren't delivered, the NMSS (?lololol?) is the path that every title is reaching for. I don't need to get into that, there is no shortage of YT videos addressing this "mind set". This is to say, that given the hundreds of dollars I've spent this year on new releases, I'm playing NMS. Sad but true... Thanks for sharing your experience with NMS & NMSS.
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
@@threshious Visuals are important, but more important is the cadence and structure of the information presented. That's what you nailed in my opinion. The hard part isn't necessarily doing this, it's doing this with a release cadence tacked on top. A lot of channels (even big ones like LTT) get caught in said trap. Good luck.
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.
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."
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
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.
@@threshious 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.
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
"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).
What did you say? Oh, take this new Aquarius update btw
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...
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.
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.
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
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
Sony pressured the team to release waaaaayyyyy too early. This is what ruined the launch
Bought it day one, smashed out 600 hours in about 600 hours. Still playing it now.
@@Nero-l4q 600 hours nice!!!!!
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.
@@threshious 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
All they need now is the Star Ocean update. Where you find a world with medieval levels of tech, and crash on it, with a laser rifle becoming the "Hero of Light"
No Man's Sky succeeds because they get a new wave of sales after every major update. But they are also small enough to still have a clear vision. AAA Studios...not so much. Big Corporate needs don't always mesh well with developer's visions. And sometimes you get Todd Howard.
Great video essay that convinced me to give NMS a try. I agree with basically everything you said except I think there is a silver lining in that studios know they can fix bad games after release and feel a level of responsibility to do so, nowadays. I just want to say that this practice of games releasing in an unfinished state was talked about when Minecraft came out, too, and back then people referred to it as the infinite beta. Which is not to say you're wrong, rather that the industry has been moving in this direction even before NMS.
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!
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.
@@GreenSabre187 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 ***LOVE*** NMS.
I got my first gaming console in 1983.
Yep.
I'm that old.
I dreamed that one day there would be a game like NMS. So I was as excited as many, as disappointed as anyone else when it came out.
And as happy as can be with what it is today.
My favourite game of all time.
lol I think it was 1975 0r 76 for me 😅
Do you remember Atari? How the joy sticks would break off at the base? 😂 😂
@@Shirden
Sure do!
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.
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. 💙
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.
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
Imagine if Sean Murray walked out and said: Now hear me out. The game is going to kinda suck at first but if you buy the game day one and be patient for the next 8 years we promise we'll deliver something truly magical.😅 He would have delivered that much has proven to be true, but would you have invested? 🤔
What you're asking is: would people have signed on to be paying beta testers of a new IP? No. So he covered it up. They all do it now.
12:18 "How was 'Hello Games' able to pull this off as an indie studio?"
They made 40 million dollars in the first month of release, with a broken-ass game. 😐 With a team of 10 people. So in theory, it should finance them for _years._
In practice, as it happens; they've plowed that cash into unmaking the initial lies.
Yeah, they were an indie studio that somehow produced AAA sales. I do think they largely believed in their own hype, rather than intending to deceive but ran out of time and money to deliver it. Sales of Joe Danger can only get you so far!
But hey I ploughed most of the time that I've played the game on that initial version and still loved it. They oversold it in the interviews they gave, but that core promise from the initial trailers that if you see it, you can travel to it, was there from day one and was what got me on board.
Funny to see the original version after all these years. Like going back to previous gen games and realising the games that seemed cutting edge then now look like junk, but at the time it delivered on that sense of wonder and exploration.
I revisit it from time to time and marvel at all the new additions. I might put a bit more time into the latest update as I've started a new save and with all the updates it's sort of like playing No Man's Sky 2!
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.
The come back is real and theway sean fixed this game …. Speechless.
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.
For cyberpunk specifically, there were whispers around launch that the studio wanted to delay it for another year, but they had contractual obligations to the polish government, who had partially funded the game, to release it when they did and they wouldn’t budge.
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.
The bad release of NMS wasn't entirely Hello Games fault. Sony is about 70% to blame for the bad and rushed launch. Sony forced a timeline and Sean and the team had ideas but they did not have enough time to do them. To me I see the interviews as "we are working on these things" more than "these are in the game right now". Not to mention the lawsuits and the flood they had to recover from. And I don't think NMS is the main cause of incomplete release syndrome, if anything I think it was the first victim of a rushed launch by Publishers. Bethesda and its buggy releases are probably more of a cause of what started the whole "its ok to release a unfinished game" mentality more than anything. Even if the games were completed they still had major game breaking bugs that are still in the games to this day, most of which the community had to fix for them. NMS is a outlier among incomplete games and one that had the right people to fix the game and were willing to fix the game with NO MOTIVE FOR MONEY.
Also in my opinion NMS is an indie game not a AAA game. Just because Sony picked them up for the launch doesn't mean that they got much of Sony's support.
Honestly the sims 4 did it first. It was pushed out way too early by EA, panned at release and took years to come back from it.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I waited to buy it until a month ago. I could not be happier with my purchase so far.
After what happened to the development of KSP 2, the end of this video hits quite hard...
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!
I came into NMS shortly after the initial release. I didn't mind not being able to interact with others because I am largely a solo player anyway. But I loved the size, and the ability to just head out "thattaway" and explore without end. I recall the first time seeing another player. (Two actaully. They were just sparkles of light, and were talking to each other, but could not hear me.) But then came a slew of other improvements, the Nexus and a chance to REALLY see other players, better detailed worlds, bases, settlements, freighters, outlaw, living ships. Too mcuh to mention, really. I found it a worth while game even in the early, aweful days. And now it is, at times, simply glorious. Well done, Hello Games.
Thattaway! Second star to the right and straight on till morning!
Wow. Had no idea. Firing it back up for the first time since 2016.
Well I’m glad I could help!
I did the same thing about 3 weeks ago. I can't stop playing.
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 🤷♂️
@@threshious 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.
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.
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?
@@threshious 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.
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.
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 RUclipsrs.
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 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.
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.
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.
Well the launch was obviously a disaster, but the concept itself has always intruiged me so im happy it got better.
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
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.
Hello games doesn't have to pay multiple redundant CEO's with bloated salaries, boards of directors, marketing execs, and teams of psychologists figuring out ways to "trick you" into pulling out your credit card. The studio simply cannot be compared to most AAA studios that are owned by corporate conglomerates. Even if it never existed, major AAA studios would still release unfinished games, because they can. Because people buy them anyway.
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
9:10 I had to turn it up, slow it down and put the subtitles on, after I heard '6800 hours into this game'
Cyberpunk 2077 has a strong redemption arc IMO and should be recognized for it ;)
They did good, I mentioned that they released DLC for it and it was really good!
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.
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 ❤
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?
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 :)
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.
No man sky lunch failure is not the same as a Triple A game lunch failure, because i know they have all resources and still made a sht game
Yeah that's what I take issue with as well.... There's those huge companies that make shitty games and never even attempt to fix them or promise future updates just to drop them again. Nms had a fail launch and broken promises, sure we can all agree there. But they're consistently updated and shown how stubborn they are at bringing the game to where they want it to be! They haven't even made any dlcs meanwhile Skyrim has 3 versions and paid mods (and updates on 10 year old games that doesn't change shit other than break mods)
I mean Bethesda haven't even proved to fix bugs in their games that's been there since the start, but depend on the community fixing their mistakes for them....
So NMS never started a trend about releasing half finished games, shit like that was there beforehand and have continued. Nms have proved it's possible to get a comeback if you consistently work on actually fixing the broken promises and focus on evolving
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
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.
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?
Probably Star Citizen
Actually Cyberpunk is really good now.
It is! Yeah I have not played the dlc, but the 2.0 update was really good.
No man’s sky is my favorite game of all time. I got it into it hit Xbox and I still have it since.
cyberpunk's bugs with that epic music always cracks me up till this date.
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.
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 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!
I came back after 2 years to NMS because of the latest update, and had the same questions in the back of my mind about Shawn, and Hello Games, ¿How the fack do they stay delivering wonders for the same initial price, and even instead of killing their flagship game, still infuse great life in it as they reveal another game that will use the tech they developed for NMS? and yep, that's the answer: PASSION in their soul for what they do.
And you have a whole Universe to your feet and still not even close to 240Gb.
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.
If the developer cares about the game, it will eventually be good. If they only care about money then is will eventually be bad.
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
Have over 1000hrs in the game and it's genuinely the sort of thing my young mind wanted back when I was on my 16-Bit home computer. Even today, NMS isn't perfect, but it's little foibles and issues I can handle. It's just such a wonderful thing to play.
There is only 1 Solar system. That is the "Sol" system, which is the PLANETARY SYSTEM around our star aka "Sol" aka the sun. Other stars have "PLANETARY SYSTEMS" around them. The more you know...
giga brain!
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.
I'd say the "We'll fix it after release" is a Bethesda issue
How Hello Games makes money: Small team with low overhead (compared to a big AAA studio), viral marketing instead of expensive ads & sponsorships, and drawing in more sales with each update (I've bought the game twice so far, once on PS4 and again on Steam, and gotten friends to buy it too).
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.
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.
I feel like you've identified the primary reasons why I only played a few hours of NMS prior to this latest patch update you mention.
My feelings after only 30 hours of irl play time, is that NMS is certainly worth a second or third look. With the release of so many AAA titles that make promises that aren't delivered, the NMSS (?lololol?) is the path that every title is reaching for. I don't need to get into that, there is no shortage of YT videos addressing this "mind set".
This is to say, that given the hundreds of dollars I've spent this year on new releases, I'm playing NMS.
Sad but true...
Thanks for sharing your experience with NMS & NMSS.
Glad your have found some good in the game!
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
I thought this is like a 50.000 - 500.000 sub gaming channel, you are seriously underrated with that level of quality.
Must have done something right. I had 9 subs when I uploaded and 0 Comments. Now I have over 100 subs and sweating to keep up with the comments haha.
@@threshious Visuals are important, but more important is the cadence and structure of the information presented. That's what you nailed in my opinion.
The hard part isn't necessarily doing this, it's doing this with a release cadence tacked on top. A lot of channels (even big ones like LTT) get caught in said trap. Good luck.
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.
" NMS's story was supposed to be a cautionary tale with a happy ending, not an instruction manual for the game industry"
-myself, 2022
Nice Quote!
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."
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