No Man's Sky dev talks about dealing with excessive fan enthusiasm

- Hello Games managing director Sean Murray

Few games have been subject to the amount of pre-launch excitement (and sometimes threatening fervor) as No Man’s Sky. As Hello Games managing director Sean Murray writes, it’s a giant contradiction on how you’re supposed to live with this amount of enthusiasm and demand for your game while also balancing the logistical and legal needs of game development. 

In an ask-me-anything session hosted yesterday on Reddit, Murray talked about the thin line he and Hello Games have walked for the last three years while working on development for No Man’s Sky. It’s a fun read, but Murray also tries to remind readers who can’t see into the world of game development that sometimes developer secrecy isn’t the symptom of a conspiracy, but rather a result of legal requirements. 

“Whenever devs are tight-lipped, it's normally just because they literally, legally, can't talk about a thing,” Murray writes. "Often for instance lots of devs will have a clause that says ‘you literally can't say the name of platform X’.” 

“Knowing this it's really funny watching interviews where devs are squirming trying not to the word Wii or whatever when being asked about some industry thing.”

For more stories from the development of No Man’s Sky, be sure to read the full AmA. (A brief note, former Playboy writer Mike Rogeau has clarified that Murray’s story about the Playboy interview didn’t happen.)