Metacritic score: 61. Steam review count: 227,217, with 83% of them positive. That gap is the entire No Man’s Sky story, compressed into two numbers.

Right now the game is 60% off on Steam — $23.99, down from $59.99 — and sitting at #7 on the top sellers chart. Nearly 16,000 people are playing it concurrently as of April 2026. Not bad for a title that was the internet’s favorite punching bag for the better part of a decade.

Hello Games has spent the years since its disastrous 2016 launch doing something almost unprecedented in gaming: quietly shipping free update after free update until the product matched the hype. The latest, Xeno Arena, added Pokémon-style creature battling with elemental affinities, breeding, and multiplayer tournaments. The one before that, Remnant, gave players a gravity gun called the Gravitino Coil — something developer Hello Games has reportedly wanted to give players “since the very beginning.”

The review split tells you who’s still bouncing off it. The 17% who left negative reviews have a consistent gripe: all the content is still “more of a sidequest than anything” even after major updates, as one 56-hour player put it. They keep coming back for major updates and leaving disappointed that the core loop still feels like sidequest content. Meanwhile, the positive reviews include someone with 150 hours whose entire review reads “Amaze Amaze Amaze.”

Here’s the read: if you want tight narrative design with curated progression, No Man’s Sky will frustrate you even at a 60% discount. If you want a procedural sandbox that keeps expanding — a digital aquarium you can live in — $23.99 is a steal. Hello Games has earned the benefit of the doubt at this point. They’ve shipped nearly a decade of free content into a game everyone wrote off.

The deal’s live now on Steam.

Sources