UK’s Advertising Standards Authority Investigating No Man’s Sky

Many players felt deeply upset and misled by No Man’s Sky’s marketing campaign after playing the game and realizing that not all was as advertised.

Now it seems that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has launched an investigation into this matter after receiving numerous complaints from players.  The investigation seems to be mainly focused on the game’s Steam store page. A thread on the No Man’s Sky subreddit shines some more light on what issues players have with the game’s store page. These complaints have been passed on to the Advertising Standards Authority. Some of these complaints focus on the fact that screens and videos on the Steam store page suggest different types of combat, unique structures among other things that seem to differ from what is found in the final game. According to the subreddit, the Advertising Standards Authority is holding both developer Hello Games and Valve responsible for the misleading advertising.

Should the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority declare No Man’s Sky’s advertising misleading, it could in effect have the offending material withdrawn. This has happened with games before, where misleading advertisements led to a game almost disappearing completely in the UK, one such game was the Dungeon Keeper mobile app that was found to be guilty of false advertising.