"The intensity of the feedback was overwhelming but I decided: you either had to hide or you had to face it, so I did something that I wouldn't recommend but I decided to kind of drink from the Firehose. Every mail that you send to Hello Games goes directly to my folder (...), we didn't block or mute peolpe, if you talked about No Man's Sky then I probably read it."With these words, Sean Murray, guilty of having been part of a failed mechanism, starts to talk about a long process of redemption. From the stage of the 2019 edition of the Game Developer Conference, the founder of Hello Games, visibly tense, shares his experience as a developer. His story is, at the same time, the sum of all that is good and unsustainable in the video game industry.
Hype Culture: the No Man's Sky case
August 2016, No Man's Sky is finally available all over the world. The title is one of a kind, a procedural sandbox that contains an entire universe: 18 billions of billions of planets to discover and explore. Each planet has its own flora, fauna and mineral formation to be cataloged, and belongs to an autonomous solar system that rotates around its star. Something conceptually incredible. The game should have come out a few weeks earlier, in June. In the time that separates the two dates, Sean Murray receives death threats.
The reason? The hype culture. No Man's Sky is the perfect example of a title crushed by expectations, fuelled by a marketing policy no longer sustainable. To understand why we have to go back a few years. It's 2013: in December, the latest edition of the Spike Video Game Awards consecrates the success of GTA V as the best game of the year. However, it's the announcement of No Man's Sky that steals the show during the event.
The idea of exploring an entire universe attracts immediately the attention of the press and Hello Games seeks the support of a publisher. It's in these circumstances that the small indie team of Guildford and the Sony meet. Although the Japanese giant offers to provides development funds as well, Sean and his team are only interested in the support for publication and promotion. Sony will present the title the following year from the stage of E3 2014. Until then no independent title had ever benefited from a similar treatment.
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| Bad Quality Jurassic Park Theme Cover plays in the background |
Eventually, however, something goes wrong and the whole machine set in motion to promote the title backfires against Hello Games. Murray himself, shortly before the launch of the title, tried to downplay the expectations, aware of the excessive enthusiasm built around his new video game.
At the time of release, the title placed millions of copies, physical and digital, but within a few days the discontent was rampant: the game lacked important features, some of which had heavily influenced the decision to purchase it. What went wrong during development? One of the main reasons is the flood that affects Guildford in Christmas 2013 and that wiped out the entire work of Sean and his team, forcing them to start all over again. Among the main problems, there's undoubtedly the management of the internal relationship between publisher and developer. The first used for its advertising only those elements of the game that made it appealing to the general public, without fully reflecting the vision of the team. The latter's greatest fault is to have remained a passive watcher. Sean himself bitterly notes that the faults are attributable to both sides. In an interview with Waypoint, he says "if you put a child in a cage with a gorilla you know how it will end. Don't blame the gorilla for what could happen. The child will behave like a child and the gorilla like a gorilla. There is an obvious discrepancy between the big company and the tiny studio that suddenly became relevant. " However, if we see the consequences of what happened, it's clear who paid the highest price.
The gaming industry moves a capital equal to the rest of the other spheres of entertainment put together and as in any sector involving losses and gains, caution increases with the increase in the risk factor. This leads to a paradox: the companies that play the role of patrons, who finance and support new winning ideas, sometimes pass over creative visions in favor of projects more easily framed for monetization in the short term. For these reasons, Sean is now there, drinking from the firehose to rewrite the legacy of Hello Games.
The limits of gaming journalism
"Meanwhile we learnt that press wasn't necessarily the best way for us to communicate with our players (...) if we wanted to talk with players we needed to do it directly, so we just shut down all communications with the press. And it was fun I really enjoyed it."
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| Sean Murray at GDC 2019 |
The subjectivity through which we perceive the world is further limited by trends, scoops, topics of the day: if a developer decides to abandon those channels that should guarantee him more exposure, well, there's a big problem.
In his case, Murray complains about the lack of chance to share the message he would like to send to the players, basically because no one is listening to him. The question is crucial 'cause in those words of relief there is a request to which journalism should always respond: connect developers with the macro cosmos of users who enjoy their creations. Instead, journalism produces absurd volumes of information at an incredible pace, resulting in little room for content that counts. In short, based on his experience, Sean Murray condemns a communicative acceleration that damages the vision of an author.
Perhaps we should introduce the concept of "slow-information". Maybe Murray just needed this: a vehicle that conveyed his idea in greater depth, without having his message overwhelmed by the flood of new information. A space to apologize properly to the players.
Innovation that moves everything
"We're making games in the most polarized and intense moment in gaming and it could be scary. (...) I know that games and making games is not never easy. So, if we're gonna do it, then let's not do it for anything that doesn't make an impact, (...) and let's make sure that we savor the journey every single step of the way."
Eventually, the story of No Man's Sky has a happy ending. Determined to redeem themselves, the Hello Games team renewed their efforts, with a passion and willpower that we rarely see in the industry. Sean closes his speech with words of encouragement, urging the creatives to be more daring and to exaggerate. He says that the industry desperately needs it. He and his team are on the front line. Once the storm passed, Sean started drinking from the Firehose, swallowing gags of criticism, distilling precious suggestions to give the right shine to a formula that was a winner from the beginning but presented in the worst way.
Now No Man's Sky has a completely new gaming experience: the Hello Games guys didn't stop with the NEXT update, but continued to add new content - for free! - for all users who believe in their work. The choice seems to reward both sides. The case of Hello Games tells us that innovators often face the most terrible failures. The defense of an idea and the tenacity in realizing it, at all costs, are the central point of the creative motions that push us further, in unexplored territories ready to be inhabited and shared.
I think about creatives like Fumito Ueda, who waited 10 years to have the right technologies necessary to realize his original vision of The Last Guardian. And what about Joseph Fares, who ignored all warnings to create A Way Out, a game exclusively playable in co-op? The examples are many but never enough: they are diminishing, because now companies tend to rely more and more on analyses oriented to cost-benefit, progressively giving strength to the comfort zones of economic interests, discouraging the desire to explore the unknown. Will games-as-service take over video games as artistic expression? Will we experience a period of stagnation, of creative homologation moved by profit? And if so, will we succeed in overcoming it? I'm as optimistic as Sean is, we just have to bear in mind what he said: don't get lost in the journey, enjoy it and have confidence in the courage of those who leave the paths already beaten to begin new ones.
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