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For anyone outside the video game industry, this eagerness to change is sure to seem bizarre. It is hard to imagine a TV network or movie studio making similar concessions to the demands of a dissatisfied audience, no matter the volume of the outcry. It would be as though Disney issued an alternate version ofStar Wars: The Last Jediin response to the complaints of a vocal minority of irate fans, and continued to order reshoots and re-edits until detractors were appeased. But in the world of gaming, pandering to a fickle audience is increasingly the norm. Developers, with tens of millions of dollars invested in each new project, can’t afford to alienate consumers whose patronage they depend on for a sound return. And gamers, entitled by the dynamic, expect more than ever that their voices will be heard.

No Man’s Skyis an ambitious, unconventional space-exploration game by an independent studio in the United Kingdom called Hello Games. When it was first announced, in 2013, it attracted an enormous amount of attention for its groundbreaking conceit, which used procedural generation to create an effectively infinite number of unique planets for players to discover and explore. But when the game was finally released, three years later, the scale of the virtual universe was much smaller than the early marketing materials had suggested, with little variation between planets and an absence of features that would have made landing on planets interesting. The difference between whatNo Man’s Skyseemed poised to be and whatNo Man’s Skylooked like when it materialized was stark. While it still had much to recommend it — the critical reception was largely positive — the reaction from gamers was severe.