Its not their fault the rumors got out of control.

I agree they don’t deserve any harassment of any kind, but this isn't exactly true. Over the past few days they have been playing along with the hype and misleading people (intentionally or unintentionally) about their project

At first it seemed like they were trying to pass it off as some kind of AA or AAA game (seven support studio’s, partnership with Sony, exclusive reveal with Geoff Keighley) but as more details got out, and all of these things ended up not being true, they confirmed it was indie.

Now they’ve had another problem relating to the teaser app they are releasing. At first it was going to be trailers and other promotional material, then it was some kind of playable demo, now apparently it’s going to be a tutorial on how to use the demo that will be released at a later date.

They also replied to a bunch of tweets about Kojima in a playful manner, which was probably innocent joking around, but probably shouldn’t have been done considering the situation.

The weirdest part was when the founder of the company told someone he didn’t know if his game was Silent Hill or not. I honestly have no idea what that was about.

All of this could technically be a series of very unfortunate misunderstandings, “seven support studio’s” could be Sony’s technical support, the exclusive reveal with Geoff Keighley could have been the photos they planned to send him, but weren’t able to after he publicly called them out for teasing an announcement with him without his permission, and the demo might have been planned to be one thing but they are now changing it to try to better meet expectations.

But unfortunately there’s also the very possible explanation that this indie studio got their time in the spotlight, and tried to take advantage of it to promote their game in a slightly dishonest way, and it ended up blowing up way out of proportion.

Either way I do feel a bit bad since the backlash will be much worse then it should be, but I think it’s more more then a fair criticism to say they should have handled it better.