It's been a busy week leading up to the release of No Man's Sky for Hello Games and Sony, with plenty of leaks, new information, and more coming out. This evening Hello Games' Sean Murray took to Twitter to confirm what various sites had reported that the PC version of No Man's Sky is being delayed to August 12th.
Here are a few of Sean's tweets on the situation
https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/761694858562207744 https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/761695846673027072 https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/761706277839966208
The last one in particular is troublesome, as it claims it is the earliest that Hello Games could announce that. However, if that was the case, why was it spotted on the official No Man's Sky website days ago? That led to the flurry of reports on the delay itself. Now, while I don't have a July image of the delay on their site, I have an archive of the No Man's Sky website on August 2nd, which is well before the August 5th date where Sean Murray claims is the earliest they could reveal it.
As you can see on the archived post, it says that the PC release will be worldwide on August 12th, and at the top it shows that it was saved on August 2nd, which directly contradicts what Sean Murray is saying. Before writing this article I tried to ask Sean on twitter about this discrepancy several times, but was ignored by Murray entirely.
Quick Take
The issue here is either there's a major mistake on the website side and Murray refuses to discuss it at all, or Murray is intentionally being misleading on this. What makes this extra frustrating is this is the exact same reason he used the last time they delayed No Man's Sky and, it brings all that into question. Especially when we consider reveals like they consider the Day 1 Patch necessary for the game to be ready despite it going gold a month ago and are adding things like 21:9 monitor support at this point. No Man's Sky's marketing has often been vague to the point of obfuscation by Hello Games and Sony, and bits like this make you wonder where that is really coming from.
What do you think has happened here? Why do you think Sean refuses to comment on the matter? Is the fact that Review Copies will be arriving late affecting your decision to purchase? Share your thoughts in the comments below!