A non profit association? What is that?
Do these really not exist in your country? They are organisations that are designed to carry out a purpose without (financial) profit making factoring into decisions.
Does it benefit nobody profits from the association? There is no profit in having a job, building up experience and so on?
The word profit has a different meaning in that context than it's use in a 'not-for-profit organisation' as I spoke of. The latter is talking about financial profit - an actual entity - a profit, the former is using profit as a word for any positive benefit, ie you profit from something. The two aren't interchangeable.
The developpers' speech is as regulated as anybody else? In what context? Because not everybody is a developper telling about his game, and not every speech is related to advertizing.
You didn't provide any context to your statement "their speech is not regulated" so assumed there was no specific context. In that situation it's true - developers have just as much regulation in speech as we do.
If you're talking about advertising, then they have exactly the same regulation in advertising as we do, that is, determined by the laws of the land in which they are advertising. In the UK that's regulated by various bodies, of which the ASA is the first call of action in the case of media advertising. This thread is talking about the ASA, therefore I presume we are talking about the advertising that the ASA covers. If you're talking about other forms of marketing such as development blogs etc. then the ASA don't cover that, so it's irrelevant to a discussion about the ASA (not to say it's not an interesting topic in and of itself - it is).
The last remark is unfounded. What example given in the post with developpers'quote is similar?
It's not unfounded - the ASA is like other subjective regulators in the UK - their primary purpose is pretty much to avoid *offence*, which is a subjective and culturally aware phenomenon. Sophie Dahl's advert wasn't banned because it was inaccurate, but simply because it was deemed offensive to women. Likewise adverts might be suitable for showing at certain times of day but not others. This ' subjective and culturally aware phenomenon' is best described as 'common sense'.
The equivalent in the developers advert is saying the game's ending varies based on the players choices. It factually does vary, and it's also common sense that the player is not going to be shown an entirely complete different universe for every possible action the player can take.
The question is not to know if people can distinguish between the product they have in hand and reality, but to know if when developpers say that aliens are going to feature in the game, the aliens have to feature or not in the game.
If advertising said that aliens are going to feature in the game and they didn't then the ASA would uphold any complaint querying that. But that's not the case here. The advertising said the ending would vary.. and the ending of the game does vary.
Some players are upset because the extent of the varying does not match their expectations, but the ASA applies common sense when it said: "we considered that most consumers would realise there would be a finite number of possible outcomes within the game"
and to finish the quote:
"and, because we considered that the advertiser had shown that players' previous choices and performance would impact on the ending of the game, we concluded that the ad was not misleading. "