Shuhei Yoshida, the immensely popular president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, has said he understands why some fans have been critical of controversial space exploration game No Man’s Sky.

In case you missed it — which means you would have had to miss literally the whole month of August — disgruntled gamers have been raging all over the internet. This rage largely stems from the about the absence of features and functionally in the final release that development chief Sean Murray had previously referred to in interviews and previews. This includes things like multiplayer mechanics, factions, to trading systems. And I know what you’re thinking — isn’t that a normal thing for gamers to do on the internet? Yes, but not like this. In fact, I haven’t seen backlash like this really ever. But back to the point.

Speaking to Eurogamer at TGS 2016, Yoshida said: “I had the opportunity to play the game right before launch – and I restarted playing the game on launch day with the Day One patch – so I could see the struggle for the developers to get the game out in the state that they wanted.”

Yoshida said that personally he “really enjoyed” his time with the game, but could understand why others might not feel that way. Further, he acknowledged the over-promising nature of Sean Murray prior to release, but largely chalked it up to him being an indie dev, not a PR/marketer.

“I understand some of the criticisms especially Sean Murray is getting, because he sounded like he was promising more features in the game from day one.”

“It wasn’t a great PR strategy, because he didn’t have a PR person helping him, and in the end he is an indie developer. But he says their plan is to continue to develop No Man’s Sky features and such, and I’m looking forward to continuing to play the game.”

Lastly, when asked if Yoshida thought the fiasco surrounding the game upon release had harmed the PlayStation brand at all, he said the following:

“I am super happy with the game actually, and I’m amazed with the sales the game has gotten, so I’m not the right person to judge if it has ‘harmed’ the PlayStation brand. I personally don’t think so. If anything, I am proud that people can play No Man’s Sky on PS4 as well as PC.”

In other news, you may remember the report last month that No Man’s Sky was receiving an unprecedented digital return policy from the likes of Steam, Sony, and Amazon. However that actually went down, it has now been revealed that upon trying to return a digital copy of No Man’s Sky to Sony, you get the following response.

My Opinion:

I mean he kinda has to say that, right? The whole thing seems like a mess, and sadly, No Man’s Sky will forever go down as one of the most controversial games of all time and it will probably negatively affect Hello Games going forward, which is incredibly unfortunate.

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Tyler Fischer is a Senior Writer for MONG who plays video games when he’s not busy researching alien conspiracy theories at 2AM. You can find him on Twitter.