No Man’s Sky Failure
“No Man’s Sky”, this brand new revolutionary had been under development for months and fueled itself with hype to become one of the most desired games. Thousands preordered a game without ever have played a single hour of it, it was already a success without a single line of code. The original idea and concept of the game was so good that everyone suspended disbelief and bought into the hype of the game. Fast forward to a week after release, the game is tanking down in sales, terrible reviews stream in endlessly and thousands demand refunds. What happened here and how did this highly anticipated game fail so badly.
Well we can shed a little light on the case with some networks theory, using networks effects and the concept of equilibrium points, the predicted amount of people who were going to buy the game was so high that the resulting actual value people held for the game decreased and caused it’s release day says to tank and have to rely on pre-orders made before then. Moreover after the reviews began to pour in continuously a ton of bad reviews came in therefore giving bad signals, using Bayes Rule we can calculate that the chance of good product receiving so much bad reviews is very unlikely meaning that most people knew that the game was in fact bad therefore leading to even higher decrease sales even after low initial day sales. Enough people gave it a negative review and wrote the game off that the information cascaded through word of mouth and eventually no one bought in.