Ad watchdog looking at No Man's Sky

The marketing of No Man's Sky continues to be an issue. Eurogamer has confirmed with the Advertising Standards Authority that the UK ad watchdog is investigating the marketing of the Hello Games space exploration title, specifically its Steam store page.

While the ASA wouldn't provide more details of its ongoing investigation other than to say it received a number of complaints about the game, one purported complainant posted about the ASA's response on Reddit. It appears that the ASA is looking into a number of representations in the screens and videos on No Man's Sky's Steam page. For example, the videos show ship and animal behaviors that don't appear to be included in the actual game, while screenshots may misrepresent the type of structures found in the game and the size of creatures found on planets.

Should the ASA find the No Man's Sky advertising to be misleading, it can compel Steam and Hello Games to remove the offending materials both from the Steam page as well as any other marketing of the game. The Reddit user who posted about the ASA's response, AzzerUK, told Eurogamer he was more interested in bringing games marketing in general back down to earth moreso than seeking retribution against No Man's Sky or Hello Games specifically.

"I figured that if we want Steam store pages for games to start falling in-line and stop misleading consumers, then it would take consumers to point these problems out to the ASA, rather than all sit around on Reddit complaining to each other but assuming that it'll all get sorted by itself eventually," he told the site.

Steam says its user reviews for No Man's Sky have been "mostly negative," with 35% of reviewing users giving the game a thumbs up. Recent reviews have been summarized as "overwhelmingly negative," with just 11% of more than 13,000 user reviews in the last 30 days being positive.