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No Man’s Sky launched a decade ago to one of gaming’s messiest reception disasters, and today it’s celebrating its tenth birthday with more players than it’s ever had. That’s not a redemption arc anymore, that’s just the story of the game now.
A decade, 40 updates, and still going
Sean Murray marked the anniversary with a letter to the community, and the numbers he shared are wild. Tens of millions of players have logged hundreds of millions of hours in the game, and they’ve still only uncovered less than 1% of its planets. Ten years in, and the universe still isn’t fully explored. That’s the kind of scale most live service games can only dream about.
Since launch, Hello Games has shipped 40 major updates, all free, adding base-building, exocraft, settlements, mechs, pets, and living ships along the way. The game’s also landed on basically every platform going, Switch, Switch 2, PSVR, PS5, Xbox, and more, which is a genuinely mad achievement for a studio that Murray says hasn’t grown all that much since launch.
What’s next: COSMOS and Light No Fire
The team isn’t slowing down either. Murray teased an upcoming update called COSMOS without giving much away, and confirmed Hello Games is still deep in development on Light No Fire, its next big game. Last year’s Voyagers update reportedly pulled in more players than the game has seen since it first launched, so whatever COSMOS turns out to be, there’s clearly still an appetite for it.
No Man’s Sky, a launch disaster to comfort game
It’s easy to forget just how bad things were at the start. No Man’s Sky launched short on promised features, got investigated by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, and spent years digging out of a reputation hole. That investigation cleared Hello Games of wrongdoing, but the community sentiment took far longer to turn around, only flipping to “Mostly Positive” on Steam back in September 2021. Now it sits comfortably at “Very Positive.”
Ten years, 40 updates, and one very patient fanbase later, No Man’s Sky’s comeback story doesn’t really need explaining anymore. It’s just a good game now, and Hello Games has earned the right to keep cooking.
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