Shahid Kamal Ahmad has worked as a Strategist Content Director for Sony in the past, during which he worked on securing many indies as exclusives. Among them, No Man’s Sky turned out to be biggest surprise of them all.
Now that the game has launched, it turns out that the developer of No Man’s Sky used misleading marketing tactics to advertise features that were strangely absent from the final game. The major complaint among the majority of the users is that despite having a procedurally generated universe where every planet is generated using a random algorithm, there is no way to interact with another player.
This multiplayer feature was conveniently hinted by the developers throughout the marketing of the game but the final game is completely absent of any sort of multiplayer interaction between the player. The other disappointment relates to the randomness of the game, which was expected but still the marketing relied on pre-built assets to drum up an experience that appears to be largely missing in the final game.
This has resulted in players asking for refunds for the game. Strangely enough, both Sony and Valve are acknowledging the refund requests for the players, even for those who have played the game for 40-50 hours, which is an unprecedented move in the history of refunds on PSN and Steam.
Shahid Kamal Ahmad, who helped in securing No Man’s Sky as a PS4 exclusive, left Sony a while back and now works as an indie developer in his own studio. Recently on Twitter, Shahid Ahmad seemed to express his opinions on the refund debacle for No Man’s Sky calling people who refund after playing the game for 40-50 hours a ‘thief’.
If you’re getting a refund after playing a game for 50 hours you’re a thief.
— Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
Here’s the good news: Most players are not thieves. Most players are decent, honest people without whose support there could be no industry.
— Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
We’re not talking about a consumer product in the factory sense. We’re talking about a work of art. You can’t just treat it like a widget.
— Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
In forty years of buying tens of thousands of pounds worth of games, to my knowledge, I have not *once* asked for my money back.
— Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
As a customer and a player before I was ever a developer, I’d only have asked for my money back if the game was broken at boot time.
— Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
I have no dog in this race. Just my 2p. I’ve been a dev, a pub and a funder for decades, and a player for longer than all of that.
— Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
He agrees that the game should be refunded if it doesn’t work at boot, but argues that there is no merit in refunding a game that the player has already spent a considerable amount of time, even if he didn’t enjoy his time with the game.
I’ll say it again. 50 hours. How long do they need, 5 billion hours? They still wouldn’t have seen it all. https://t.co/sHVZSR1G8R
— Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has released more than half dozen updates for the game after its launch and are slowly working on resolving the remaining issues reported by the player. While it can be argued that game development is tough, there is no doubt that the developers shouldn’t have released the game in such a broken state in the first place.
What do you think about the comments made by Shahid Ahmad? Do you think that people who are requesting the refunds after playing the game for a considerable hour are justified? Let us know in the comments below.
