Today, Hello Games founder Sean Murray took to Twitter to thank No Man’s Sky fans for helping the game cross the “Very Positive” review mark on Steam. While this may seem like an odd thing to celebrate, anyone who has followed the survival action adventure since its release knows how difficult things started out for it.
No Man’s Sky was formally announced back in at E3 2014 by Sony, making it the first indie game to be presented at one of the Expo’s centerpiece events. This spotlight, along with a number of ambitious promises of space exploration and procedurally generated worlds and creatures, created a hype machine unlike any other surrounding the release.
After a few delays, No Man’s Sky was officially released in August 2016. The hype surrounding the marketing of the game made it one of the highest-played games on Steam for the week, boasting over 200k concurrent players at launch, beating out massive releases like XCOM2 and Dark Souls III. It wasn’t long after release that things became sour, as fan reviews for the game reached a “Generally Negative” metric on the platform.
Alongside this, the concurrent player count plummeted by 80 percent, with players citing multiple bugs, gameplay issues, and a lack of promised features as to why they were disappointed with the release. It also didn’t help that Murray went radio silent on Twitter for the first two months following the debut of No Man’s Sky after being considerably active leading up to the game coming out.
In November 2016, Hello Games was able to course-correct, acknowledging the issues and noting that they were paying attention to feedback, releasing a massive free patch called the Foundation update that helped iron out a lot of the kinks and issues. As the years went on, No Man’s Sky continued to get considerable updates, both big and small, all of which were added for free.
Since the developers didn’t give up and listened to fans, No Man’s Sky continues to grow and prosper eight years after its release. There has been no word on a sequel, nor are there plans to make any of the updates or DLCs paid at this time.
