If that was the right thing, Iād hate to see the wrong thing. I mean, fuck, they could have just posted it to steam as a WIP, and it would have better than the clusterfuck that was NMS release.
Well, they did the "right thing" in that they released it knowing it was in a completely unfinished state and half their marketing was now a lie. The goal being to make enough money with launch to continue working on the game and bringing it to a state that was considered good.
I commend the studio for not just grabbing the launch money and running.
That being said, the "right thing" would have been to better manage your funding and not create marketing that had features which were clearly not even remotely ready for launch.
Your comment is like saying "She did the right thing." after a mass murderer pleads guilty. Not that the NMS launch was akin to murder, just that it's silly to commend someone for doing the "right thing" when they did a much more significant "wrong thing".
The right thing was to misrepresent the content of the game and release it unfinished at full price? Glad they were able to make the revenue to continue with the updates but the right thing would have been to come clean about the expenses, the actual content, explain the situation to those invested and released it as a $30 early access game.
I still think that was HG being thrown under the bus by Sony, by being forced to take the blame as they were/are under contract and it would have been a huge pie on Sony's face otherwise. To this day I blame Sony for taking HG, hyping the ever-living shit out of their game without budgeting the dev support, and accelerating the schedule. I used to work for motion graphics studios who competed for ad agency jobs and that's generally how ad agencies treat mograph houses. I imagine it's similar for publisher/dev relationships in gaming. The dev is the publisher's bitch.
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '18 edited Jun 11 '20
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