UK Advertising Standards Authority are looking at NMS

All the people that say 'get over it' baffle the shit out of me.

Laws have clearly been broken, or at the very least potentially broken both in Australia, and evidently in the UK as well it seems.

If laws have been broken, laws have been broken. These laws are in place to protect consumers... LIKE YOU!

Why are you advocating for large corporations to think they can do whatever they want and pull the wool over consumers' (your) eyes?

You WANT to be ripped off and taken advantage of? You WANT big corporations to break the law that's there FOR YOUR BEST INTERESTS?

I seriously don't see why people are saying 'stop the whinging' 'oh this again' etc. etc.

If you're happy to be taken advantage of by big corporations that's on you. Don't tell other people not to be upset because they don't want to be taken advantage of (illegally).

Super Bunnyhop's done a recent video on the subject and the vagueness of the law seems to allow for it.

Today, ASA found that the No Man's Sky Steam page was not misleading and that no further action was required. The full text of their finding is on their website.

https://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2016/11/Valve-Corporation/SHP_ADJ_351045.aspx#.WD70zfkrKUl

Hopefully all the babymen can find something new to complain about.

@werupenstein: hey i'm a babyman and i take offense to that!

ha, 23 complaints.

That ASA thing is an interesting read. It says that 23 people formally complained to them. I'm not sure if they decide to investigate purely on number of complaints or if they needed to see the general fuss going on around the game too. Here's my favourite line from the text:

Some complainants challenged whether water was depicted in the same manner as in the game.

This is pretty essential stuff. I understand that they shouldn't mislead people about the game, but is pretty wild to see just how far the animosity for this thing has grown.

I am not going to go down the rabbithole about the game being misleading but that Steam page trailer definitely is/was (if they have finally removed it).

Nope. That trailer is still the first thing you see on the steam page.

Going by the Advertising Standards Agency regulations on how complaints are handled titled "Non-Broadcast Complaint Handling Procedures", they respond to every complaint in some form to the complainants. Then if they receive many of them and they are already investigating, then they post a formal notice on their website. There are some Ads which are complained about the most every year which the ASA never investigates because they are clearly not in breach of the code - such as this ad with a man in skinny shorts dancing which received thousands of complaints last year - just because people find them annoying. The ASA only investigates those which they think might be breaking code, regardless of the number of complaints. There could be a single complainant, but if the case is obvious then they will act on it (this is more common with competitors who are countering an argument in the ad which they believe miss-represents the market, though).

Interestingly, they say they categorise investigations in Standard, Complex, and Fast Track. I'm not sure what constitutes the latter (probably topics where the detail being investigated is potentially harmful such as the ingredients of food or the operating power of electrical appliances), however for Complex procedures they extend the investigation to seek advice from experts after first letting the creators of the advertisements argue their case. I wonder if the No Man's Sky investigation made it to this tier purely on the specificity of the content shown in the game. If it did, it would be interesting to know who they got advice from and the decisions made in judging what constitutes fair advertising of these mechanics. On the other hand, if it stayed in the Standard procedure, I wonder if Hello Games were able to get more lee-way by explaining on their own terms what these features are and how they work. I am sure a lot of these problems could be made to sound like mild exaggerations as a result of the procedural nature of the game affecting playthroughs, when in fact they are mechanics not present at all in the first place.

Someone should get Patrick Klepek on this.