On Pile-Ons and Haters: A Theory
push to talk #17 // how a surprising strategy defused the biggest pile-on in gaming history
Just about anything you do on the internet—particularly anything that earns you lots of attention—can and likely will earn you some haters.
It can hit hard out of nowhere. Maybe one day you post something too spicy, or respond flippantly to the wrong person. And suddenly you have hundreds of people showing up in the comments calling for your head.
And you think, wait a minute, who are these people?
Some have called this phenomenon "getting canceled." But that's always been an inadequate framing. "Cancellation" is basically a low-resolution, placeholder word used to describe massive, sudden reputational loss in the internet era. But it doesn't capture the most interesting part of the phenomenon.
What has always fascinated me is the magical moment at the beginning of the process, when somebody has clearly crossed a line, and all at once the whole world feels they have the license to attack—that a normal person has become a valid target for a pile-on.
What is this “pile-on” phenomenon? How does it happen? And can it be stopped?
To answer this question, I want to look at one of the most infamous online pile-ons in the history of the games industry. It's a story about a small British game developer that made big promises about their game, then failed to deliver on launch, earning the ire of millions of gamers in the process.
But then, against all the odds, they kept improving the game for years on end, eventually earning players' respect and becoming one of the greatest game development turnaround stories ever.
I'm talking, of course, about No Man's Sky by Hello Games.
Most professionals in the games industry are already familiar with this story, but what a lot of people don't know is that No Man's Sky isn't just a story about a small team rebuilding their reputation—it's also a business success story, as the game has since gone on to gross hundreds of millions in revenue and becoming a perennial seller in league with indie darling hits like Terraria and Stardew Valley.
But there's yet another element to the story that I'm obsessed with, and which I think almost no one else is paying attention to.
It's that, despite eight years of tireless updates to the game and a broad online consensus that No Man's Sky successfully delivered on what it promised, the game still has a dedicated group of online haters who won't forgive Hello Games for their handling of the game's original launch.
I think these haters are fascinating, and their continued devotion to speaking out against NMS is actually illustrative of something interesting about the way opinions evolve online.
Today I'm going to even make the case that haters have an important role to play in online ecosystems—and that they might actually be crucial drivers of phenomena that seem otherwise inexplicable.
There's a chance that what follows is going to come across as the insane ramblings of a guy whose brain has been fried by spending too much time on melted gaming forums like r/leagueoflegends and r/dotamasterrace. It's true that I am a worse person for all the time I've spent in these venues. It's entirely possible that I desperately need to touch grass.
But I hope to convince you otherwise. I believe there's something strange lurking beneath the surface of the commonly understood story of No Man's Sky.
To reach that cursed land, we're going to have to start from the beginning.
What happened to No Man's Sky?
In broad strokes, the story goes like this:
NMS was one of the most hyped indie games in history. After a series of impressive showings at industry events like E3 and mainstream media excitement around the game, expectations reached a fever pitch. But when the game launched players weren't happy with it, and many even believed that NMS developers Hello Games had been dishonest in their marketing of the game. It was review bombed, and rapidly dropped from over 200,000 concurrent players at its peak to 1/100th of that amount a mere month later.
But over the course of the next eight years, Hello Games shipped update after update to the game, eventually adding not just all the major features it had promised, but many more. The game's reputation improved dramatically eventually achieving something like the polar opposite of its initial reception.
NMS started selling again, and getting nominated for awards. By 2020, four years after release, it was common knowledge that "No Man's Sky is good now." And today, the game remains a hit. Reliable analytics sources like GameDiscoverCo estimate that the game has grossed more than $220 million on Steam alone. That doesn't even include console sales, which could easily double that figure.
It almost sounds mundane, doesn't it, when the story is told in brief, like those three short paragraphs above? But seriously: think about how improbable each of the individual story beats are. There's nothing like it anywhere else in entertainment.
How does a single artistic work go from incredibly hyped, to universally hated, to widely seen as redeemed, all over the course of a decade? And then it makes its creators, a small group of British nerds, hundreds of millions of dollars? There's no comparison for it. This is the kind of story that get turned into movies.
If the No Man's Sky movie ever does get made, there's one scene they'd have to use in the trailer. It's the fulcrum of the story, the moment that—at the time—seemed like the greatest moment of triumph for our hero, though it actually held the seeds of his downfall.
It was the evening that Hello Games founder Sean Murray was invited onto The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Back then, game designers were often treated as a joke—here comes Grandma's Boy, fresh from his basement to show us his silly little toys!
That was the usual treatment.
The Colbert interview wasn't like that. Colbert treated Murray like a god. He literally called Murray a god.
Watch that segment all the way through, and pay close attention to Murray's body language. He's clearly anxious. His neck is red. His ears are red. He's laughing too easily. Looking down a lot. My man is an introverted video game programmer who, just a few years prior, was leading tech on games like Black, Burnout 3: Takedown, and Geometry Wars: Galaxies. This guy is a nerd, and he is suffering. He does not want to be in front of a crowd on a late night show that, back in 2015, was sometimes reaching over 6 million viewers per episode.
But Murray knows that he needs to put on a good show, and his team has come prepared. Very prepared, in fact. The "live gameplay demo" he's going to show Colbert isn't actually live gameplay at all. It's scripted, so Murray doesn't even need the controller he's holding. Watch his hands, and you'll see that the demo he's "playing" isn't actually gameplay at all. Murray mostly doesn't even bother pretending to press any buttons or move the sticks. It's a pre-rendered video.
But everybody is eating it up. Colbert is asking Murray questions about the game, and Murray is doing a great job selling it. He's indulging himself a little bit, making promises about the scale and scope of the game that might be hard to live up to. It's excellent showmanship from a very nervous game designer.
But at 5 minutes and 50 seconds into the interview, Murray crosses the line from showmanship to something more dangerous.
"Can you run into other people? Other players?" Colbert asks.
Murray, sort of wincing and generally looking like the most nervous man who has ever lived, is in over his head. He hesitates for a moment, blinks, and you can actually see the moment he decides to go for it: "Yes," he says. "But the chances of that are incredibly rare, just because of the size of what we're building."
Cool, so it's got multiplayer! Right?
Colbert is delighted. He calls the game "awe-inspiring," and says "I can't wait to actually play it." And you can tell that he really means it. He's hyped for this game.
But Murray is still wincing. He knows he's written a check his ass can't cash. But… maybe he can? The release of his game is over a year away. If his team works hard, he can probably deliver. He's got time.
That was on October 3rd, 2015.
When No Man's Sky launched 10 months later, on August 9, 2016, it did not have multiplayer. In fact, it didn't have a lot of things that had been shown in trailers like the ones on The Late Show.
To his credit, Murray did try to warn players, albeit quite late in the game.
On the day before launch, with many pre-orders for the game already locked in, Murray came clean on Twitter about the lack of multiplayer in No Man's Sky.
Or, at least, he tried to come clean.
The first tweet should have been pretty clear, but the second tweet sort of obfuscated things. Was he saying that it's mostly not intended as a multiplayer experience, despite having multiplayer features? Or that it doesn't have multiplayer at all?
In any other situation people would have understood Murray's posts to mean that there was no multiplayer in No Man's Sky. But because Murray had explicitly said that there was multiplayer in various interviews over the previous year, people weren't really sure how to read this message.
Murray had repeatedly framed the odds of players encountering each other as a low-probability event, not an impossibility. So when the game launched the next day, most players were expecting to be able to see other players in-game while playing—if they could find each other.
The ensuing tragedy didn’t take long to play out.
In a Reddit post the same day of launch, a user named TheGalacticCactus logged his ill-fated attempts to meet up with a player who had named a planet he landed on. "I'm About to Meet Another Player! (Seriously)" his headline declared. But in a series of successive updates, it became clear that the experiment was a failure. The two players were definitely in the same in-game location, but couldn't see each other. The poster's emotional deflation is obvious as he goes through a miniature, rapid-fire version of the seven stages of grief.
"I've gone from thinking it's a glitch or server issues, to defending Hello Games, a company I was VERY wrong about... and now I'm really neutral," TheGalacticCactus wrote. "After seeing how much was removed from the game I lost a lot of faith in them… Things that were removed before release should have been addressed to avoid people buying the game expecting things that aren't there."
Even the games media—many of whom had interviewed Murray extensively—were confused. PC Gamer covered the GalacticCactus Reddit post, speculating that server issues might be the cause of the failure for the two players to be able to see each other. After all, the game was selling like crazy on Steam. 200,000 concurrent players crowded in that first weekend.
A day later, Kotaku reported that "It's Still Not Clear Why Players Can't See Each Other In No Man's Sky."
Soon enough, players came to grips with the truth. There was no multiplayer. And that wasn't all: the game was definitely missing features that had been shown in the trailers. The aliens weren't that impressive. There were bugs. Many of the planets looked the same, negating players' motivation to explore a universe filled with "quintillions" of them.
Immediately, the backlash kicked in. Negative reviews flooded into the game's Steam store page, and it became clear to everyone that this had every ingredient needed to form an absolutely incredible pile-on.
And gamers love a good pile-on, especially one as justified as this one.
At the core of any truly great pile-on there has to be a clear, believable rallying cry—a meme—or compelling short story, encapsulated in a viral phrase.
This story had a meme like that. A uniquely powerful one, because of its simplicity.
It was this: Sean lied. He wanted to trick people into buying his game, so he said things that weren't true. And now he must be punished.
As an explanation, the meme makes perfect sense. Internet detectives like this guy posted well-sourced screeds proving that Sean Murray promised countless features which didn't end up making it into the release version of NMS.
But you might notice something about the "Sean lied" meme, which is that while it certainly looks and feels true based on the way things went down, it relies on a crucial assumption about the intentions and beliefs of the Hello Games team. It's true that they teased one game and shipped another.
But did they do this on purpose? Knowingly? Or was it possible that it was all a screwup—that they tried their best and fell short? What if they believed they could deliver on their promises, but ran out of time? If you say with confidence that Murray lied, you're eliminating the possibility of the latter option.
I don't have any special insight into what Murray or the rest of the Hello Games team were thinking in the leadup to launch, but having actually worked alongside game dev teams for a decade, I don't find it too hard to empathize with them, even though I wouldn't personally run the kind of marketing campaign they did. They marketed the game they intended to make, not the game they'd made, and that was a dangerous game to play.
But I am sympathetic to them, and here's why: Game devs are almost always unrealistic about how long it'll take to build any given feature. My best guess is that, in the leadup to launch, Murray and gang figured they'd have enough time to get multiplayer working. So they went ahead and teased it. And then, in the final days before launch, when they hadn't yet got it figured out, they panicked, didn't know quite what to do, and decided to just keep working on it and hope that they could figure it out before it became an issue.
The strongest evidence for this more generous reading of the situation is the fact that the original-run physical copies of No Man's Sky actually had a logo promoting online play, which later had to be covered up with a sticker. This implies that the plan was for the game to have multiplayer at launch, but the feature just didn't make it in on time, taking even the publisher by surprise.
This explanation also matches what Murray has since said about that experience. Multiplayer, he told Eurogamer in an interview two years after the launch, was "a big complicated thing… We were fighting for it until pretty much the final hours."
But back in August of 2016, we didn’t have any of that context. Lacking a coherent explanation for the missing features, players naturally assumed the worst.
And then, with the world burning around them, the Hello Games team made a decision that even now I find incredible.
They went silent.
Sean Murray—once a nonstop Twitter addict—stopped posting altogether for almost three months after the launch.
In that period of silence, the internet’s most dedicated memelords stepped in to explain the situation.
At the time, I had just started a new job doing player communications on League of Legends, so I was paying very close attention to the situation to see how Murray and team would try to recover. I assumed they’d come out with a statement, own their shit, explain what had happened (probably something to do with deadlines) and promise to get multiplayer and the other features working in a future update.
But they did not do that.
Instead, they just… started shipping updates.
All comms were moved from Murray’s Twitter to the official Hello Games patch notes and online blog. In a post called "Development Update," released just a few weeks after the game's launch, the studio made a new promise which went little noticed by the wider gaming community:
"What matters now, as always, is what we do rather than what we say. We’re developers, and our focus is first on resolving any issues people have with the game as it is, then on future free updates which will improve, expand and build on the No Man’s Sky universe. This is a labour of love for us, and it’s just the beginning."
–The Hello Games team, in a blog post dated September 2nd, 2016.
Hello Games realized that there was nothing they could say to change the internet's opinion of No Man's Sky. So instead, they put their heads down and got back to work on the game.
The first major update—called the Foundation Update—hit three months later.
After that, they shipped another update. And another. And another. And another.
They added multiplayer, two years after launch. They added VR support, and base-building, and next-gen visuals. They weren’t just delivering things promised before the launch, but features that no one ever expected or asked for.
And it was all free.
A lot of people have done a better job than I ever could of telling this part of the story, of how No Man's Sky eventually came to be seen as a good game. It was a gradual process, one that—nearly eight years later—still hasn't finished.
And in fact, a big tipping point came four years in, with the release of the video "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" by the Internet Historian, which received over 20 million views.
The video, which is really worth watching in full, told the story with humor and empathy for the developers, with no punches pulled when it came to showing up close and in detail how badly they'd screwed up with the original launch.
But that video, which at the time felt like a capstone on the story, is now four years old, and in some ways it marked not the end of the pile-on story, but the beginning of a new phase of almost something like a reverse pile-on. Instead of having outrageously bad word-of-mouth, things suddenly shifted gears for NMS, and you began to constantly see threads spreading the good news that "No Man's Sky is good now, actually."
The impact of all this positive word-of-mouth had a real and noticeable impact on sales for No Man's Sky. Around late 2019 and early 2020, it started selling again, and not just alongside with major updates, but every day.
Today, No Man's Sky isn't just a game whose reputation recovered, but it actually became so beloved that it's now entered the pantheon of perennial hit games that sell more and more copies continuously, like Grand Theft Auto V, or Minecraft, or even another indie darling like Terraria.
NMS is now inarguably a massive success story. Any time the game comes up in conversations online, you can find thousands of players praising it as one of the greatest turnaround stories in gaming history.
Hello Games is still shipping major expansions to NMS. And they’ve since shipped other games, and even announced another major title, Light No Fire, which Murray has promised will be “earth-sized.”
Truly, we’ve come full circle.
But there’s something I’ve noticed whenever I see people talking about NMS online. Something that doesn’t fit the mainstream narrative of sin, penance, and hard-won redemption. Eight years into this story, you’d think almost everyone upset about the original release would have moved on. But not so.
No Man’s Sky has haters.
Despite NMS's infamous turnaround, and Hello Games's astonishing near decade-long quest to improve their game, some of the same posters who were most enraged by its launch are slowly but surely making headway in an online war to shift public opinion back against the game.
And this, really, is maybe the most illustrative part of the story, for our purposes. I’ve been obsessed with NMS haters and the way they behave online because I think they illuminate the real nature of so much online controversy, and pile-ons in particular..
See, even if you win the reputation war, you will rarely—if ever—convert the most truly dedicated haters to become advocates for you. They will keep hating no matter what.
To understand this, we have to talk a little bit more about the psychology of haters, what motivates them.
Why do the haters hate?
The first thing to understand about online pile-ons is that they may include lots of passers-by—people who don’t know much about you, but are nonetheless there for the party. But these people will mostly leave as fast as they arrive.
Real, lengthy, sustained pile-ons are almost always driven by more engaged people who are familiar with you, enough to build up a negative story in their minds about you. These are people who are really emotionally invested in taking you down.
Sometimes I like to call these people “engaged detractors,” but we can stick with “haters” for now for simplicity’s sake.
The truly dedicated hater has taken time to get familiar with you, your work, or your brand, and that will come across in what they say about you or your team. In fact, if you pay careful attention to the words they use, you can usually pinpoint one of a few common underlying themes in the way they talk about you. These themes are usually phrased as qualitative judgments about something you’ve done.
These judgments—which may or may not correspond to anything real outside of the mind of the hater—serve as the key beats in a negative mental narrative the hater has built up about you:
“UNDESERVED” PRAISE - At some point in the past, you might have done something that received widespread positive attention, but which the hater considered to be “mid,” undeserving, or even actively pernicious.
AN UNPUNISHED SIN - Maybe you previously did (or appeared to do) something the hater considered to be wrong and—crucially—got away with it without appropriate punishment. The definition of “appropriate,” in this case, is of course completely up to the hater’s personal judgment.
EGO CHECK - Maybe, the hater thinks, you’re just a little too cocky. You think you’re hot stuff, but you’re no better than the rest of us, and you need to be taken down a notch.
If there’s a single unifying idea underlying these themes, it’s something like justice or maybe more specifically balancing the scales. You got too much praise and too many honors, so a corrective dose of negativity is needed to take your reputation or your ego down a notch.
Or you sinned, and sin demands punishment.
Or you just seem like you love the smell of your own farts.
Haters are motivated by a sense of righting that which is wrong. They sense an imbalance, and desire to correct it.
And that bring us back to No Man’s Sky.
See, for the people that believe that Murray lied to them, no amount of updates or improvements to the game could ever balance the scales or bring justice. In fact, as more and more players came to praise Hello Games for their commitment to the game, these haters actually became more incensed.
Why, they wonder, is everyone letting this company get away with their bad behavior? For these haters, what was once merely an unpunished sin became an unpardonable offense as Murray and team have racked up accolades and adoration.
For these guys, only one thing matters: Murray lied. The only way to change their mind is to convince them that assessment is wrong. And for some of these people, who’ve spent years nursing a feeling of injustice, there’s slim chance of them ever adopting a generous interpretation of the events leading up to the game’s launch.
Now at this point you might be thinking, “who cares? Of course the haters are gonna hate. Just ignore them, it has no impact on anything.”
But on this point, I disagree. In the modern era of marketing, a great product and solid word of mouth is almost all that matters. To sell a game, you have to have advocates—this is something that Hello Games understood at primordial level. Knowing that they couldn’t win over the haters, they focused on creating new advocates by doing the right thing for players who were willing to give them another chance.
That strategy was brilliant. It worked. Hello Games now has millions of dedicated advocates,
But the haters are still there too.
The most crucial thing to understand about committed haters is that they will not let the issue go. A hater is the opposite of an advocate. An advocate is somebody who likes you enough to say something nice about you online, or to promote your work.
An advocate wants you to succeed. A hater wants you to fail—to be taken down a notch—to get your comeuppance. It’s not just that they don’t like you. It’s that they want the world to dislike you too.
And so the specific criticisms they employ don’t matter. A truly engaged detractor will generate any number of criticisms. They might even go so far as to make bad faith arguments in the interest of contributing to the overall scale of the outrage.
But more often, they’ll simply have a clear eye for your real weaknesses, and dig in on those. And in the case of No Man's Sky, as with any game, there are of course real weaknesses there, waiting to be pointed out.
My hypothesis is that there is still a legion of dedicated No Man’s Sky haters who’ve honed a new argument against the game: “It’s boring. There’s nothing to do.”
All fine and well. The game probably is boring for many types of players—it’s about collecting resources and exploring planets at your own pace. That’s not for everybody, so it would be ridiculous to claim that everybody with something bad to say about No Man’s Sky is somehow a hater with a personal grudge against Sean Murray.
You can find plenty of totally reasonable, balanced takes on NMS online. Responding to a thread asking hypothetically how the game would have been received if it launched with all the features it has now, one Redditor summed up the situation elegantly:
But true, committed haters do exist. And eight years after this story began, they’re still posting for justice.
So watch carefully when Hello Games reveals a new trailer for its next big game. Go check out the Reddit comments. I suspect that among the excited NMS fans—the advocates—you’ll also see something else. Comments with a strangely caustic, bitter tone.
They might bring up the NMS launch, or they might take a more indirect tact. Either way, we’ll know who’s posting those comments. It's the keepers of the flame. The justice bringers. The gamers who don’t forgive.
One thing is certain: Haters are gonna hate.
That’s it for this week. Did you notice that I didn’t include the news links roundup this time? I’ve started to suspect it’s not really the main draw for the newsletter. Shoot me a DM or reply to this email if you have thoughts on that.
See you next Friday.
What a great analysis, thank you! Personally, I enjoyed your link round-up, but can imagine it's a lot of work to keep going, so dropping it would be understandable. Either way, great read!