They fixed it later is not an argument about what happened

No Man's Sky released on 9 August 2016 for PlayStation 4 and on 12 August for PC. It was made by a team of roughly a dozen people, against expectations set for a game with several hundred. Parts of what had been promised were missing at launch, including any meaningful cooperative play; Sean Murray later admitted the studio had failed to control the hype.

Then a curious detail. The British advertising regulator, the ASA, examined twenty-three complaints about the game's Steam page and ruled in November 2016 that the advertising had not misled: the description honestly called the world procedurally generated, which meant the specific creatures and landscapes in the images had never been promised as such.

Formally, everything was within the rules. The players still did not get what they were expecting. Both are true at once, and that is what makes the case interesting.

Then came eight years of free updates: Foundation in November 2016, NEXT in 2018, Beyond in 2019, Worlds in 2024, and dozens of smaller ones. The game won The Game Awards prize for best ongoing support in 2020 and won it again in 2025. The story has circulated as a model redemption arc.

I have two problems with that. First, the repair does not undo what was sold in August 2016 — people paid for one thing and waited eight years for it to become that thing. Second, it does not work as a model. Hello Games could afford it because the studio was tiny, owned its rights and had money from launch sales. A studio on a publisher's money simply closes after a launch like that.

The practical conclusion for me is editorial: a review is a statement about a specific moment, and the moment has to be named. Date, version, platform. The game I write about today may be a different game in three years, and the reader needs to know which one they are reading about.