The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled No Man's Sky's controversial Steam page did not mislead consumers.
Its decision means screenshots, videos and text currently on the No Man's Sky Steam store page may remain. While the ASA's investigation looked at Steam specifically, its ruling applies to the PlayStation Store, too.
The ASA had received 23 complaints about No Man's Sky's Steam store page, with most accusing the assets of painting a misleading picture of Hello Games' space title.
The ASA contacted both Valve and Hello Games as part of its investigation, but because Valve doesn't handle the individual store pages for games sold on its platform, the buck passed to Hello Games. And based on emails sent to Eurogamer this month, it's clear the Guildford developer put a lot of effort into defending itself. It provided footage of the game and detailed responses to each allegation, stressing at every turn it did not mislead consumers.
The ASA's ruling is based upon Hello Games' assertion that No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated game, and so the player experience varies from playthrough to playthrough.
"The summary description of the game made clear that it was procedurally generated, that the game universe was essentially infinite, and that the core premise was exploration," the ASA said.
"As such, we considered consumers would understand the images and videos to be representative of the type of content they would encounter during gameplay, but would not generally expect to see those specific creatures, landscapes, battles and structures."
