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KLAMarine on 31 March 2018
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Aura7541 said:
KLAMarine said:

How was it not an active promotion? Did Sean force himself onto Sony's platform? Was Shuhei Yoshida ambushed into doing that demo with Sean? I highly doubt any of these things occurred without Sony's permission. If so, I must applaud Sean. He's a clever man.

Doesn't seem all that different from Sony hosting NMS promotional content on their media outlets:

First or third party, promotion is promotion.

Again, we're going more into the semantics of what 'active' means. If you consider Sony giving Hello Games a platform to promote their game, then be my guest. I already conceded your point, in fact. However, if we are to go that route, we need to consider the spectrum of what constitutes 'very active' and 'not very active'. I will ask you again because you did not answer my question, in the PSX video, who was more 'active' in promoting NMS? Sean Murray or Shuhei Yoshida?

I'll take your word for it and agree that Sean was more active. This does not change the fact that Yoshida was there and agreed to do this as well as put in a nice word in for NMS at the end. Also doesn't change the fact that some party at PlayStation edited and uploaded the video to PlayStation's YT channel.

Aura7541 said:

Promotion is promotion, but not all promotions are created equal. Considering that Microsoft owns and therefore, is also in charge of Rare's inner workings, it would not be unreasonable to think that Rare's PR is filtered through the higher echelons of Microsoft before it goes out into public. In contrast, since Hello Games is 3rd party, unless stated otherwise, the studio does not have to pass their PR through a 'Sony filter'.

Was there no 'Sony filter' for whatever is shown up on PlayStation's E3 presentations? If there was, it was poor. If there wasn't, it was irresponsible.

Either way, Sony's consent was surely required.

Aura7541 said:

If you interpret that as not "seem[ing] all that different", then sure. However, to quote Mark Twain, "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug". The situations are similar, but they are not identical.

I'm going to give Sony the benefit of the doubt: perhaps they just got careless and allowed a faulty product to go all-out and at full-blast at their E3 conferences and even put Yoshida's face alongside the product. Perhaps their QA fell asleep as they played a couple rounds of NMS before allowing Sean such extensive access to PlayStation resources.

 

All that said, even as shit was hitting the fan, PlayStation support was hesitant to issue any refunds:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-09-16-sonys-shuhei-yoshida-on-no-mans-sky

 

I'd understand a hesitance to issue refunds for digital purchases but one would think an exception could have been made for this ONE case. Apparently not.

Sony was sticking with this product through thick or thin, game-crashing bugs and all and don't bother them about it. Go bug Sean Houdini for a transaction that occurred with PlayStation's combined media resources' blessings and through Sony's own network .

 

You wanna call this 'active' or 'passive' or 'string cheese' is ultimately irrelevant: Sony banked on this scandal with their full consent and customers got screwed.