One line in that message is particularly revealing: "It's the only thing I live for." Whether or not he was exaggerating, that's the type of obsession that fuels so much of the nastiness in gaming culture. There are plenty of great gaming communities and, in my experience, most gamers are perfectly pleasant, but too many are unable to separate themselves from their products. Video game fans who are zealously attached to their favourite games — even, as in this case, a game that has yet to come out! — are prone to get aggressive when they feel like they're being attacked. Or when they get bad news.

Don't worry: I'm fine. I've never felt like this dude was actually going to come after me, and working at Kotaku forces you to develop a pretty thick skin. When you write about video games, you get used to trolls and threats. This can't even compare to some of the harassment faced by outspoken women like Sarkeesian, especially on Twitter. The social network is crucial to the careers of critics and reporters who use it to spread word of their work, develop sources and communicate with readers, but it is pathetic at dealing with harassers. I reported @BeachClasherMDR for these threats, but as of this writing (four days after the report), Twitter has yet to do a thing.

As soon as I broke news of the game's delay on the Thursday morning, I watched the No Man's Sky subreddit explode, filling up with messages about how it couldn't be true, how Kotaku must be trying to troll them, how we're always wrong. The subreddit's overworked moderators were quick to clean up many of these threads, but for the next two days it was bedlam. People tried to dig up reasons the delay couldn't have been real — "Kotaku's sources are anonymous, so it can't be true" — and even came up with elaborate schemes to harass GameStop employees across the US.

One Redditor, Gilchrist78, declared that he'd called 30 GameStops and confirmed with them all that the news was false. "NMS is NOT delayed," he wrote. When I commented that I was confident there was indeed a delay and that people really shouldn't get their hopes up, he doubled down. "So you have 1 source in Gamestop," he wrote. "I have 30."

No Man's Sky has been heavily hyped since its debut trailer shocked the gaming world at the VGAs in December of 2013. It's hard not to be excited about a game that looks like it will let us fly through the universe and land on an infinite series of beautiful worlds. The New Yorker has gushed about it. Murray has been on Stephen Colbert's show to show it off. And that was before it even had a release date, which was slated for June 21 until last week's delay.

What really exacerbated the situation last week was a series of threads on Saturday by a Redditor who worked at EB Games and said he'd received a poster with a new release date for the game: June 24, three days after the original date. Wishful thinking combined with blind devotion led members of the No Man's Sky subreddit to accept this as fact. Again they started flooding my inbox and Twitter with angry messages.

By Saturday morning I was nervous that the developers might wait until Monday or Tuesday to confirm the delay and that I'd have to deal with an entire weekend of these messages, but I soon found out that they'd be announcing the news on the PlayStation Blog that day. No Man's Sky was pushed to August. I've never been so relieved to see a video game get delayed.