Good, they deserve it (as well as anyone else that does it)

Its one thing when a game doesn't live up to its potential or some aspects get scaled back. But No Man's Sky doesn't have huge advertised features. I suggest watching the Angry Joe Review, he gives a lot of evidence of this.

Most studios don't mislead people like this.

The great video game apocalypse begins. I'll miss games.

There are several games which to me under delivered this gen that I bought at launch:

SFV 

DriveClub 

Destiny 

The Order 1886

However, I didn't feel as if I was cheated, misled etc in a way whereby I felt I was hustled. 

The key difference between those games and NMS is going to watch a magic show and coming out disappointed as the tricks weren't great and being robbed by a street magician when he makes your expensive watch disappear for good. 

HG could have gone the SFV road and said we are launching this game now with these features and we will add these features the following month, followed by these features etc explained clearly what they will give for free and what they will charge for. 

What they have done instead is waffle about features, be really vague and tease things, hinting that might be in the game and flat out lie about others. 

Then Sony has gone further to say that things are cut during development to ensure a better game is released at launch. However, it's a shame they failed to tell anyone about this until way after launch. Even then, the only way to get this information was by calling them and being passed around their process to the point of insanity. 

Exactly. I remember there was going to be a classaction lawsuit against Bethesda for the shambles that was F3, NV and Skyrim on PS3. Never actually happened obviously.

Well that would be a stupid lawsuit, there's nothing lawsuit worthy there, just poorly executed port jobs.  They didn't falsely advertise.  Colonial Marines, No Man's Sky, Rome II Total War, and other such games outright, blatantly lied in their marketing material with bullshots and missing prominent features, fake gameplay, and misleading terminology.   Honestly, while I agree BethSoft deserves criticism for those problems, the fact people treat them as being as bad as EA, Ubi, WB, and Konami at times is just plain laughable and sad.  Bethesda makes mistakes, those others do borderline (or even outright) illegal stuff in ther gross pursuit of more money and preorders.

And here I thought NMS had finally come and pass. This game is just not allowed to move on...

So what's the penalty if this investigation finds wrongdoing?

Randy Pitchford and Gearbox/Sega did get sued for Aliens: Colonial Marines.

I'd argue that Molyneux has never gone quite so far as Hello Games did, with the exception of Godus. Still, I'd be surprised if he or Lionhead hasn't been sued in the past for all the shit he's pulled over the years.