I think the post mortem sounds something like this:

" We had the game we showed in the trailers. That's how we made the trailers. Sony was impressed and showed up with a suitcase of money and promises to handle PR. All we had to do was release on PS4 first.

Of course we accepted. Why wouldn't we?

Once Sony got involved, I was on talk shows talking about the game. We were working on the PS4 port, and, well, it didn't all fit.

Sony didn't like the performance we were getting with the full game on PS4- procedural generation happens on the CPU, and frankly the PS4's CPU was maxed out by the basics... So we started hacking it down, trying to get the frame rate they required. Feature after feature hit the floor. Still, things were fine, we were only hacking up the PS4 version...

The difference between the PS4 version and PC version became so dramatic that Sony told us that we had to release the same game on PS4 and PC - otherwise the platform would look bad, and they were already losing gamers to PC. Our world then became a mad scramble to port the cut-down PS4 version back to PC.

We even had boxes for the PC version printed already, and had to hide the word "multiplayer" on the already printed boxes. Multiplayer was always going to be in it, but it was one of the features cut late in the PS4 cut-down... not because of performance really, but because of the complexity of moving all of the multiplayer code to the PSN API, and then maintaining a separate set of multiplayer code for PC. Remember, we had to ship the same game on both platforms, keeping an identical feature set here was nearly impossible - so it had to be cut, per Sony's direction.

Of COURSE the PC launch was buggy. We barely got it to COMPILE cleanly before we had to ship. And OF COURSE Sony didn't allow us to ship review copies to anyone pre-release, they knew how much we had to chop it up and knew we weren't going to match the product their PR hype engine had sold.

So we shipped it. And now we're stuck, because we have the complete game, but we can't give it to anyone, because it has to be the same game on PS4 and PC.

Sony's already trying to distance themselves from this release, and they are actively looking for a scapegoat. As such we've been ordered to stay silent while our customers beg for information. Even if we could talk, I don't know what we could say without throwing Sony under the bus... and honestly that's not fair.

While I could say that all of this was due to Sony's involvement, it was also Sony's involvement that enabled us to ship a game at all. NMS was a gigantic undertaking, and as an indie studio we never would have made it this far without accepting their help. We signed a deal which made a lot possible that previously wasn't, but it also hurt our creative freedom, as such deals usually do.

All I can do is hope that the PS4 Pro can handle more of the original features, and that Sony allows us to release those features for the Pro- Sony's kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place, though, because if the PS4 Pro gets a drastically better version of NMS, they are basically telling the world the better version existed already but it was neutered to perform on the PS4.

So Hello Games, like our customers, has to wait. "