No Man's Sky has passed its tenth anniversary, and Hello Games says the game is drawing more players now than at any point since it launched. The space exploration game was released on August 9, 2016 for PS4 and PC, reaching Europe a day later, and has since been ported to Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PS5, Switch and Switch 2, Video Games Chronicle reports.
Studio co-founder Sean Murray marked the date with an open letter to players, published on the PlayStation Blog and Xbox Wire and reported by Video Games Chronicle. Murray wrote that he felt "surprisingly emotional" about the milestone and thanked players who stayed with the game.
Ten years ago, on 9th August 2016, travellers across the universe set foot on their first alien planet in No Man's Sky.
A decade of free updates
No Man's Sky launched to a hostile reception, with players objecting that features they had expected were missing at release; its Steam user rating fell to "overwhelmingly negative." IGN reports the rating took two years to reach "mixed" and another three to reach "mostly positive," and now sits at "very positive."
The Guildford studio has shipped around 40 major updates in that time, all of them free, adding base-building, exocraft, settlements, mechs, pets, living ships and expeditions, and rebuilding the underlying universe more than once. On PlayStation the game picked up PSVR support, then PS5, then PSVR2. Murray said the anniversary year has brought the game's highest player numbers since launch, and that the studio won a Game Award and a BAFTA for best evolving game.
Less than 1% explored
Murray also used the letter to note that a decade on, players have collectively explored less than 1% of the game's planets. IGN points out that its procedurally generated universe holds more than 18 quintillion of them, and that Hello Games estimated before release it would take 585 billion years to see them all.
The studio is not done with either the game or the format. Murray teased a forthcoming No Man's Sky update called Cosmos, and Hello Games is separately working on Light No Fire, an adventure, building and survival game set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth.
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