A Developer Hiding in Plain Sight
So I read this thing all the time, [where] people blame Sony. Like “Sony brought all of the hype to the game!” or “Sony put loads of pressure on them to release!” or whatever. I mean, that's just an obvious thing that Sony would do. That's what a publisher does. I mean, they wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't do that.I don't know what a good way to say this is, but like, we worked with Sony, and we didn't have to. We didn't know what it would be like, but also, [laughs] maybe we should have understood? I've said to people before, if a kid gets into the cage at the zoo with the gorilla…Austin: Where is this going, Sean? [laughs]I don't blame the gorilla, right? That's what the gorilla does. The kid does what the kid does. There is there is an obvious mismatch between a huge company and this tiny, tiny company [that has] suddenly become important.Shuhei said stuff that he then later rolled back on, and has been really, really complimentary of the game. The situation was an interesting one, but the reality is, the moment we stepped on stage at E3, and the moment we just showed at VGX [the Spike Video Game Awards] and got the kind of reaction that we did, and a whole bunch of stuff was set in motion, I think. It's easy to look back on it now and go—it was almost inevitable about how things would play out. The moment you got that excited about the game and the spotlight that we were under and how far out we were from release, there was just a whole load of factors that came into play."The moment we just showed at VGX [Video Game Awards] and got the kind of reaction that we did, and a whole bunch of stuff was set in motion, I think. It's easy to look back on it now and go—it was almost inevitable about how things would play out."
The Future of No Man's Sky
"Hopefully people can understand, we were under just ridiculous pressure, as in from the fans, from external forces, from running out of money. We just had deadlines that we couldn't move."
A Game Is More Than a Single Person
Austin: All that passion, all of that love for what you're doing. How do you make sure that you don't crunch, that you don't burn out, that you don't mess up work life balance?I think we did [mess up] coming up the original launch. I hope people don't get too mad at us about that because I know lots people get mad about that. Hopefully people can understand, we were under just ridiculous pressure, as in from the fans, from external forces, from running out of money. We just had deadlines that we couldn't move. We used to have conversations: "What would you give right now just for an extra day? What would you give for an extra week?" We would have done anything, and we were really invested in the game. We'd worked for years. That is super regrettable. We will never put ourselves in that position again.It's a luxury that we have that the game's been successful, and we're in a much better position and we're much smarter now. Much more stable. We have a bit more power in things, due to the success No Man's Sky that [helps us to] avoid that. But it is a hard problem to solve, and I don't think we have solved it yet. But every update we've done has been better managed than the last one, and that was one of our big things coming out of launch. We need to do this better because this team—it's a small team. They are super talented, and if they all left, if we all left, then Hello Games is nothing. That's that's all we have. That is the company."The bingo card of all the things the Internet can do. It ticked all of them. We did them all. It got as bad as it can get. And I still really love our community."