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Chased Off of YouTube, Leaked 'No Man's Sky' Footage Runs to Pornhub

Leaked footage of highly anticipated game briefly comes online, but now Pornhub is one of the few places you can find it.
Image: Pornhub.

I always feel a little dirty when I look at leaked footage of any kind, but rarely so much as when I brought up Pornhub yesterday to check out a video featuring the hyped space exploration game No Man's Sky. I watched as some dude blasted some rocks with a laser while a porn star squeed with joy in an orbiting video ad. I had to go to Pornhub, as this corner of the web was the only place I'd been able to find the footage after it'd been yanked off of DailyMotion, YouTube, and almost every other video hosting site.

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I always get a laugh out of these bizarre jaunts to Pornhub, but they're nothing new. Back when leaked videos for Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 4 first started making the rounds last year, Pornhub was the best place to find them. More recently, its users dabbled in political humor when one uploaded a video of the UK's Boris Johnson after the Brexit vote with the title, "Dumb British Blonde Fucks 15 Million People at Once." It's a bastion of open media in an era when so many other sites eagerly comply with copyright requests, much to the presumed horror of No Man's Sky's makers. When word of the leaked videos first got out a little over a week ahead of the game's official launch on August 9, poor Hello Games' founder Sean Murray sent out the following tragic tweet: "We've spent years filling No Man's Sky with surprises. You've spent years waiting. Please don't spoil it for yourself :(" Few games in this age of "let's play" videos and rampant leaks enjoy the heights of hype No Man's Sky has soared among over the last couple of years, and much of that hype springs from the mysteries surrounding it. Somehow, Hello Games managed to keep most of its secrets. Aside from some vague and artsy preview videos and carefully curated presentations, there's really been no clear idea about what goes on once you've landed on one of its (allegedly) 18 quintillion procedurally generated worlds.

That is, until Reddit user Daymeeuhn posted the videos on DailyMotion on Friday, after he supposedly managed to buy an advance copy on eBay for the low, low price of $1,250. The PornHub video shows 21 minutes of footage with awful resolution, and none of it's particularly exciting to watch (which may say something about the game). But soon after YouTube and other video site started taking down the videos other people were posting as mirrors, Daymeeuhn announced on Reddit that the whole thing was "quickly becoming a unpleasant experience for me" and that he felt bad that Sean didn't like it.

"There are more spoilers than you probably realize with this game," Daymeeuhn wrote in the post. "I'm only a couple hours in, barely touched a few planets, and already I've had many FUCK YEAH moments. On the one hand, I'd love to share those with you, but in the other hand, Sean is right… why not just wait and experience them firsthand? I dunno. The first videos I posted were perfect—they spoiled nothing and just showed a taste."

But if you really can't wait, the video's still up on Pornhub.