No Man's Sky Cleared Of False Advertising By Advertising Standards Authority
No Man's Sky ran afoul of some gamers who felt that the images, video,and text on the Steam Store Page for the game were misleading. At least 23 people felt that the content on that page was misleading enough that they complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK, but the ASA has now cleared Hello Games of any misleading advertising. Most of the complaints reportedly focused on a misleading pictures and assets of what the game offered on the Steam Store page for the title.
Complaints alleged that the screenshots and videos provided depicted advanced animal behaviour, large firefights, and ship-flying behaviour that didn't end up in the launch version of the game. Some complaints also alleged that the screenshots misrepresented the graphics of the game and complained that the lack of loading screens and factions to fight over certain territory was misleading.
The ASA was in contact with Valve and Hello Games, the maker of No Man's Sky, during the investigation, but most of the investigation focused on Hello Games since Valve had nothing to do with content on Steam Store Pages. Ultimately the ASA made its ruling that there was no false advertising because the developers assert in the advertising that No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated game and the play experience will vary. Differences in the systems generated by the game and power of player's computers would also affect the quality of the graphics in the game and the ASA says it believes most consumers would understand that.
"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," the ASA said.
"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."
SOURCE: Eurogamer