After the backlash of the game’s initial release, players of No Man’s Sky complained to authorities that the information posted on the game’s Steam page was misleading. As a result an investigation was conducted by the UK Advertising Standards Authority. They’ve just revealed that they found no issues with the advertising and have since closed the case.
“We understood that, as NMS was procedurally generated, player experiences would vary according to what material was generated in their play-through. The summary description of the game made clear that it was procedurally generated, that the game universe was essentially infinite, and that the core premise was exploration. As such, we considered consumers would understand the images and videos to be representative of the type of content they would encounter during gameplay, but would not generally expect to see those specific creatures, landscapes, battles and structures,” the report says.
In order to cooperate with the investigation, Hello Games had to provide in-depth explanations as to how the game works, give exact resolution and strength of the PC the images were captured on and videos of in-game footage to represent how the game is different for each player.
“We understood that the screenshots and videos in the ad had been created using game footage, and acknowledged that in doing this the advertisers would aim to show the product in the best light. Taking into account the above points, we considered that the overall impression of the ad was consistent with gameplay and the footage provided, both in terms of that captured by Hello Games and by third parties, and that it did not exaggerate the expected player experience of the game. We therefore concluded that the ad did not breach the Code.”
Despite the time-consuming process of cooperating with that investigation, Hello Games released a massive update for the game on Nov. 27 that adds in a new creative mode with base-building and farming.
