Don't believe that 'No Man's Sky was a mistake' tweet - it was a hack
"No Man's Sky" was a game years in the making. It promised endless space exploration - hop in a ship and jet from planet to planet at your leisure! Go on an alien safari! Collect materials!
Except some folks felt that their expectations were unfairly built up, that the eventual game wasn't what the game's developers promised it would be. Making this all the more complicated, the game's developers are a small handful of folks - in the dozen or so range - making a massive space exploration game.
On one side, fans felt ripped off; on the other side, fans sympathized with a small group of developers trying their hardest to make something gigantic.
In the end, no one was happy. Gamers scorched the game's review page on Steam, the world's largest digital game store. The game's developers, Hello Games, went silent. Until Friday:
The message above was tweeted from the official Hello Games Twitter account on Friday; it's since been deleted (thus the screenshot above), and the Twitter account is now locked/set to private.
On first blush, this looks like a potential hack. Why would the folks behind "No Man's Sky" call the game a "mistake" publicly? It's still a product for sale, even if they feel that way. On top of that, it stands to reason that they care about the game they made regardless of the backlash it received.
"The tweet is from me, but somebody from the team took it down," a person responding from Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray's email account told Polygon's Brian Crecente. "We have not been coping well," he said. Murray didn't respond to an email request on Friday morning (he's based in the UK, so it's already mid-afternoon there as of publishing).
If you're wondering whether the tweet actually happened, it can still be clearly seen on the Hello Games website's Twitter module:
But don't worry: your first blush reaction was dead-on.
Murray - or someone tweeting from his account, anyway - says that the Hello Games server was compromised. "Server hacked. We're binging Mr Robot Episodes as quickly as we can looking for answers. Ep05 is a cracker," his account tweeted this morning. "If anything was a mistake, it was using LinkedIn without 2FA [two-factor authentication]."
Hello Games (and Murray) has otherwise gone completely dark since launching "No Man's Sky" back in August. The team has issued a handful of updates to the game, and Sony's Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer the following back in mid-September:
"I understand some of the criticisms especially [Hello Games' Founder] Sean Murray is getting, because he sounded like he was promising more features in the game from day one. It wasn't a great PR strategy, because he didn't have a PR person helping him, and in the end he is an indie developer. But he says their plan is to continue to develop 'No Man's Sky' features and such, and I'm looking forward to continuing to play the game."
Plans for additions to "No Man's Sky" have been discussed, but it's not clear when anything is coming. The game is otherwise available now on both PlayStation 4 and PC.