This week for Video Game Tuesday I’ve got a message for the makers of No Man’s Sky. It’s an Open Letter to Hello Games

To Sean Murray and Hello Games,

First things first, congratulations on launching No Man’s Sky. I don’t think anyone can say that it’s not an impressive feat to launch such a game with a huge amount of content with such a small team of developers. Now that the niceties are out of the way, let’s get down to business. Mainly the lack of communication that you have had since the game has launched. I understand that the community had a large backlash towards you and that can be a scary thing. Honestly I truly get it, and I understand the desire to hole up and ignore the world, better than 99% of the world’s population understands frankly. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that you didn’t have proper communication leading up to the games launch and essentially none after the launch. You guys tweeted that you were super excited about the amount of people playing that first day, which is great.

But you never explained why things you said would be in the game weren’t in it. Why can’t we see other players? I can understand if the feature was cut, I do, but you have to say why in order for people to understand. You haven’t done so, and in fact you haven’t said why to any of the numerous questions sent to you from the community. The No Man’s Sky subreddit is a wasteland full of angry people who wanted nothing more than to love the game you made, but you didn’t give any explanations why it’s so different from the promotional material we saw leading up to the launch. This makes people angry, and frankly they are completely justified with that reaction. Your lack of communication is unacceptable, even Bungie a developer who has been a laughing stock in the community for the last couple of years has a nearly weekly post saying at least something, even if most of the time it’s nothing of substance.

So if you ever want to earn back the respect, you’ll need to break this silence. It’s been months coming and frankly every minute that goes by without anything said from you is going to cause you to become more and more hated. So my advice is to just speak up. Be honest, be frank, we’ll understand, but we can’t do that if you don’t talk to us, the gamers who wanted to love your game.

Michael Blaker