After a debut that many in the media painted as a disaster, No Man’s Sky is now a sprawling, award-winning masterwork with a loyal userbase. Here’s how Hello Games and Creative Director Sean Murray snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
It’s a balmy, breezy day on the farm. In the distance, I can hear the gentle sputter of the generator that powers the hydroponics shed I built a few weeks ago. The crops are plentiful and I should harvest them soon but, first, there are other jobs to do. Starships coast overhead and land at the local trading post.
I stepped out of my base one morning and it was just there, towering over the meadow, eclipsing the planet’s turquoise moons. “That’s handy,” I thought.
This is not some freaky cheese dream. I’m playing No Man’s Sky, a game where you can be a miner, a mercenary, an explorer, a farmer, a builder, a botanist, a starship captain or a trader – but you don’t have to select any of those roles from a menu. No Man’s Sky is a universe with 18.4 quintillion planets to explore and with so much to do that you get to be whoever you want to be in it.
I’ve been playing this game for about four years and it keeps getting better. But every time there’s a Steam discount or a new update announcement, a familiar drama plays out in social media comments.
“Can they release a sweet DLC that changes the name to No Man Wants?”
“Even at 100 per cent off, One Man’s Lie would be a waste of people’s time and energy.”
“Most things deserve a second chance. Except NMS. That doesn’t deserve a second chance.”
Gamers know the story – or at least the bones of it. Space trading and survival sim No Man’s Sky built great expectations with a pair of sizzle trailers at gaming expos, one at VGX in 2013, then at E3 in 2014. With its lush, procedurally generated vistas and cinematic space exploration, it looked like the best thing since fried gold. The founder of the company that made it, Sean Murray, spent a couple of years being interrogated by the games press about its apparently revolutionary features. He even appeared in a nine-minute segment on mainstream American television – The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
The Late Show segment saw Sean Murray climb to the top of hype mountain with no visible route down.
When the game was released in August 2016, the Internet backlash made headlines of its own. So vitriolic and toxic was the reaction that Murray had to call Scotland Yard to deal with the death threats. It was glitchy, it was borked. It didn’t load or it stuttered and froze.
There were creatures that looked like they were glued together with random parts and planets that looked like plastic wastelands of nothingness.
Worst of all, a lot of the promised features were missing. There was no multiplayer code in it at all. Murray had repeatedly told interviewers that players were in a shared universe, and – though unlikely – would be able to find each other.
Now, five years later, No Man’s Sky is still selling new copies and has an estimated user base of at least two million owners (according to SteamSpy). So, what went right?
Radio silence
No Man’s Sky launched, with a significant number of pre-orders. On Steam alone, there were over 212,613 simultaneous active players on launch day. Hello Games could have taken that money and said, that’s it, there’s your game. But it didn’t. Instead, it ploughed the profit back into the company and kept working on No Man’s Sky until it was right. And once it made it right, it kept going.
The first thing Sean Murray did was stop talking. The No Man’s Sky Twitter account posted the following on the 18th of August, 2016:
“We’re totally focused on customer support right now. Then we’ll move onto improving and adding features to the game.”
Then nothing for months. The team stopped talking to the press too.
“We talked about the game too early,” Murray told Eurogamer in 2018, “We were naively excited about the game, and we talked to other people who were naively excited about the game and they interviewed us and we all talked really excitedly! And I will not do that again!”
What Murray learned, and what an increasing number of organisations are learning, is that the mainstream press selects news according to specific values and negative stories encourage page views. “We learned that the press wasn’t necessarily the best way for us to communicate with our players,” Murray said at GDC 2019, “The press kind of operates downstream from the community.” It’s a pity because Murray and Hello Games didn’t do anything unforgivable. He fumbled the marketing of a video game. That’s it. That’s all. And then, after all that, he and his team fixed it.
Hello Games had committed to giving its community exactly what it wanted – and then some.
Mostly, the team now communicates directly with its fanbase through patch notes and – when it was ready to show that it had been working on new features – Twitter. When a new tweet finally came – aside from one nasty incident where a hacker took over the account – it was 100 days later, announcing a significant update; Foundation.
No Man’s Sky 1.1 added many of the features some players thought were missing from the original launch – and some new ones. There were bases and farming, portable save points, freighters and new game modes for those players who complained that the launch game wasn’t enough of a challenge. Hello Games had committed to giving its community exactly what it wanted – and then some.
Data-driven game development
“I decided to kind of drink from the firehouse,” Murray told the 2019 Game Developers Conference, “Every mail that you send to Hello Games, goes directly to my phone (…) I wouldn’t really recommend it, but it helped me gain a new perspective. And that perspective is that everything is just data.”
Murray dug deep into that data and found that most of it was noise. 80 to 90% of people complaining were not that invested in the game. The other 10 to 20% were players who had clocked at least 100 hours. They were worth listening to.
“We discovered some ground truth, some real incredibly clear signal,” said Murray, “37% of people were stopping playing (…) because they didn’t like the inventory system. And then suddenly, you’re like, that I can fix.”
More than that, Murray found data points he could agree with. It was an approach to game development that was agile and responded to user feedback. You might argue, that’s already a thing. There are other games doing that – on early access. But Hello Games hasn’t charged anyone a single extra penny for any of the updates it’s issued since launch.
The game was better at launch than many critics admitted – but now it’s fantastic.
There have now been 17 individually named ‘tentpole’ updates to No Man’s Sky as well as many more bug squashing patches in between, making 121 in total at the time of writing. All of the named updates have added significant new features, free to existing players. Over the last five years, No Man’s Sky has added underwater missions, bases and shipwrecks (first seen in the VGX trailer). There are more planets, a greater range of weather systems, giant creatures (seen in the E3 trailer), active portals and colossal buildings to explore. There’s are mission hubs, storylines and game modes.
Alongside that, the game has consistently and systematically improved gameplay, graphics (most notably in the latest update ‘Prism’) and the user interfaces for crafting, storage and general interaction.
The current version of No Man’s Sky far exceeds the promise of the original game. There’s VR headset support, living ships, Aliens-style exoskeletons, vehicle racing and creative base building. All of this, free to players who already own the game.
“The major features are things we’ve always wanted to add,” Murray told Eurogamer, “But a lot of the stuff is coming from the community. We’re listening to them – not in a touchy-feely way, in a pure stats way.”
Shared universe
No Man’s Sky next – update 1.50 – was an early example of Murray’s commitment to giving fans exactly what they wanted: Multiplayer.
“A very light multiplayer was envisioned for launch, and we fought right up until the end to add it, but it was immensely challenging and we knew it was something that only a handful of people would experience due to the size of the universe,” Murray told The Guardian in 2018.
Although that “light multiplayer” made its way into ‘Atlas Rises’, No Man’s Sky now has a full multiplayer experience baked in. Since ‘Next’, parties of two to four people have been able to play co-operatively, while up to 32 people can find each other in the same instance of a solar system. With update 2.50, ‘Crossplay’, players on different platforms can find each other. In 3.30, ‘Expeditions’, there are unlockable rendezvous points where you can hang out with fellow travellers. Or, you can choose to stay in single-player mode which – full disclosure – is exactly what I do.
“We don’t want to tell people how to play this game,” Murray told Colbert on The Late Show, “They can play it whatever way they want.”
The No Man’s Sky story continues, with update after update adding value to the original game.
Here’s something crucial about this story. No Man’s Sky has made millions of dollars. There are theories flying around Reddit, but our conservative guestimate, based on public data, would be at least £30m. It has continued to sell copies of No Man’s Sky – a five-year-old game – because of an investment of time and company resources. Hello Games fixed the game because it was good business, not out of kindness or altruism. Well, not entirely.
“When our updates come out, we go to the top of the Steam charts,” says Murray. And it’s true. No Man’s Sky started winning awards shortly after its release – and it’s still getting attention. In 2019 it was nominated for Best Expansion and Best XR game at the Golden Joystick Awards. In 2020 it was nominated as Best Evolving game in the BAFTAs and won XR Game of the Year at SXSW.
Ultimately, No Man’s Sky isn’t Fortnite or Call of Duty: Warzone. It’s a kooky, contemplative, experimental game that, by some quirk of fate, got a lot of attention from the media. It’s AAA quality, built by an independent team with an independent sensibility.
“We’re back making games for people who want to play them,” Sean Murray told GDC in 2019. And that’s the way it should be.
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