Apart from the mighty Star Citizen, consider No Man’s Sky as the best E.M.S “Expectations Management Simulator” ever made

Consider the main piece of concept art for the game by Grant Duncan and Jacob Golding (4K wallpaper, re-tinted in Gimp)

[..] a beautifully choreographed wish-fulfilment tease. You can see some of that promise in the game’s heady concept art, almost indistinguishable from screenshots of the game in action
~Time magazine

Note however such an image does not however arrive with any kind of automatic, in-built meaning. Rather, the target demographic (targeted that is by games industry marketing) conveniently provides these somehow ‘inherent’ meanings and gives context

Meanings such as: “This is a beautiful image with rich colors” – “A mind expanding vision of another world..” – “[..] a game about the spirit of exploration inspired by the optimistic science fiction of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein and the cover artwork of these works in the 1970s and 1980s” (Wikipedia)

Such an image is not representative of some kind of vague, symbolic wish fulfilment – it is not an ‘ideal’ or distant dreamy end goal that ‘the final game’ did not andor could not possibly live up to; rather, No Man’s Sky was already in motion – playing itself – the moment the image was conceived in the minds of the artists / in the imaginations of the game developer. In short, it was managing / they were already stage managing their own expectations right off the bat (and perhaps largely unconsciously)

That is to say – such an image should be considered the complete (fragmentary) game in itself. After all, it cannot be truly separated from the total (/media) experience of No Man’s Sky – it’s not like ‘the real game’ is over there and the concept art exists somewhere way back over here, alone and isolated. Rather No Man’s Sky, like a smashed hologram, contains an image of the (imagined) whole in each of its (largely pathetic, poor conceived) parts

To consider No Man’s Sky one of the modern marvels of the Video Games Culture Industry – a near perfect virtual simulation of private-public expectations – eg. “I expect to flog a shit load of these games to suckers. Ha!” In this way, No Man’s Sky was always already a hyperreal product ‘existing’ without substantial base, foundation, bedrock – a mere pipe dream, somehow already fully formed from the outset

In many ways Players should be thankful for such a simulation, because that’s all there appears to be – a ‘real illusion’, busy shimming with sensual color and forever unrealizable sci-fi possibility deep in the electronic video gaming desert void