President of Sony's Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, said he understands the complaints being leveled at Hello Games' Sean Murray over the shaky launch and ongoing issues of the procedural space exploration game No Man's Sky. "I understand some of the criticisms especially Sean Murray is getting," Yoshida told Eurogamer at the Tokyo Game Show, "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," Yoshida said.
It's interesting to hear that coming from Sony. While Hello Games both developed and published No Man's Sky, Sony's partnership with the developer was to provide promotional and marketing assistance. While it may be fair for Yoshida to call out Murray for making promises he couldn't keep, it's also worth remembering that a vice-president at Sony once described No Man's Sky as "potentially one of the biggest games in the history of our industry" according to this May article in The New Yorker.
With all of the hype fallout, it's perhaps not surprising that Murray has largely gone silent of late. Hello Games' Twitter account hasn't posted anything since August 27, and Murray's personal account has been quiet for nearly an entire month. The last post on the official site, regarding patch 1.08, was from September 2, though SteamDB shows updates to the experimental branch and internal servers within the past day.
Yoshida made some positive statements about the game as well, saying he "really enjoyed" No Man's Sky and that he was "looking forward to continuing to play the game."
