Fabulous, candid interview: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-20-the-big-sean-murray-interview
Sean Murray: We went through.... Well, you can use your imagination. you know what the internet can do. They crowdsource ways to be mean to people. They did all the things they can do. I was dealing with the Met[ropolitan Police], Scotland Yard, stuff like that. It was serious and it was real. I'd say, personally, I wasn't a fan. I think the internet isn't necessarily really good at knowing how to deal with people in the fairest way, I think. They are right in a lot of the mistakes they point out. I looked at a bunch of that stuff and thought, yeah... We talked about the game too early. We were naively excited about the game, and we talked to other people who were naively excited about the game and they interviewed us and we all talked really excitedly! And I will not do that again!
I remember talking to Oli [Welsh, Eurogamer editor], and he was saying something along the lines of how nice it was to sit down with developers and just chat about any old thing, and I was like yeah why doesn't everyone do that? Why don't all publishers do that, why is it so scripted? I totally understand why now. I stepped back and got that perspective. Yes there was a lot of shit going on, but I was able to step back and go okay, I need to reevaluate for a bit about why I make games and who I'm making them for. This didn't just happen in one day. I need to start seeing this as data. And start categorising it and working out what we're doing here. That was my way of dealing with it.
I'll give you an overly honest answer. I've been asked loads of times to talk about dealing with toxicity or a backlash when your game releases because it's become a hot topic, it's happened a whole bunch of times, and I've always turned it down - there are two reasons for that. It's the same reasons I'm giving you a weird answer. One, it's kind of personal. I understand that it's juicy information and it's interesting to hear about. This team that made the game is incredibly talented and they made something that's really interesting - and that [controversy] should not be what defines them, and defines No Man's Sky. No Man's Sky should be the game that was super ambitious and was made by a small team and went on to grow bigger and have a cool community around it. That's what I want to talk about.
The other thing, which is the honest part, the human cost. I don't know how to deal with it. And I've never known how to deal with it. People ask what we did, and I don't think we did anything particularly good or clever. I'm not sure anyone can - an angry mob is crowdsourcing ways to make your life difficult, and they know how to do that. So I did what I did when I was a kid when I was getting shit at school or when I've had shitty bosses. I threw myself into work and made games.
And you didn't walk away from the game.
Sean Murray: Yeah, I mean... I'd love to to take credit for that as some sort of selfless act or whatever, but people don't realise it's easy for that story to run away with itself. I know I'm bias but these facts are pretty much out there - there were stories that there were massive drop-offs of people playing No Man's Sky. I think PC Gamer did this thing where they were comparing our chart with lots of other games, and it's actually normal, and No Man's Sky is doing better than those games. We could see that, we could talk to Valve and to Sony who were super helpful and they were telling us people are playing this game for a phenomenally long amount of time.
You guys were writing stories about there being massive refund rates, and that's not true - our numbers were slightly above average on PC, but that's par for the course when you have a game that sells a lot of copies and people play it on min spec machines, below min spec machines. They were way under the average on PS4, say - but we had no credibility to come out at the time and say these things. Who would believe us? Probably no-one will believe me now. That's why we were doing updates. We're not doing it altruistically. You can see when our updates come out, we go to the top of the steam charts, our numbers go up the same as it would for any big title. I'm not saying there's no story there - there's definitely problems, there were definitely people who were angry. But you give me too much credit by saying we stuck with the game out of altruism.
I remember talking to Oli [Welsh, Eurogamer editor], and he was saying something along the lines of how nice it was to sit down with developers and just chat about any old thing, and I was like yeah why doesn't everyone do that? Why don't all publishers do that, why is it so scripted? I totally understand why now. I stepped back and got that perspective. Yes there was a lot of shit going on, but I was able to step back and go okay, I need to reevaluate for a bit about why I make games and who I'm making them for. This didn't just happen in one day. I need to start seeing this as data. And start categorising it and working out what we're doing here. That was my way of dealing with it.
I'll give you an overly honest answer. I've been asked loads of times to talk about dealing with toxicity or a backlash when your game releases because it's become a hot topic, it's happened a whole bunch of times, and I've always turned it down - there are two reasons for that. It's the same reasons I'm giving you a weird answer. One, it's kind of personal. I understand that it's juicy information and it's interesting to hear about. This team that made the game is incredibly talented and they made something that's really interesting - and that [controversy] should not be what defines them, and defines No Man's Sky. No Man's Sky should be the game that was super ambitious and was made by a small team and went on to grow bigger and have a cool community around it. That's what I want to talk about.
The other thing, which is the honest part, the human cost. I don't know how to deal with it. And I've never known how to deal with it. People ask what we did, and I don't think we did anything particularly good or clever. I'm not sure anyone can - an angry mob is crowdsourcing ways to make your life difficult, and they know how to do that. So I did what I did when I was a kid when I was getting shit at school or when I've had shitty bosses. I threw myself into work and made games.
And you didn't walk away from the game.
Sean Murray: Yeah, I mean... I'd love to to take credit for that as some sort of selfless act or whatever, but people don't realise it's easy for that story to run away with itself. I know I'm bias but these facts are pretty much out there - there were stories that there were massive drop-offs of people playing No Man's Sky. I think PC Gamer did this thing where they were comparing our chart with lots of other games, and it's actually normal, and No Man's Sky is doing better than those games. We could see that, we could talk to Valve and to Sony who were super helpful and they were telling us people are playing this game for a phenomenally long amount of time.
You guys were writing stories about there being massive refund rates, and that's not true - our numbers were slightly above average on PC, but that's par for the course when you have a game that sells a lot of copies and people play it on min spec machines, below min spec machines. They were way under the average on PS4, say - but we had no credibility to come out at the time and say these things. Who would believe us? Probably no-one will believe me now. That's why we were doing updates. We're not doing it altruistically. You can see when our updates come out, we go to the top of the steam charts, our numbers go up the same as it would for any big title. I'm not saying there's no story there - there's definitely problems, there were definitely people who were angry. But you give me too much credit by saying we stuck with the game out of altruism.
