Metacritic score: 61. Steam rating: Very Positive — 83% across 227,805 reviews. One of those numbers is a scar. The other is a decade of free labor.

No Man’s Sky sits at #10 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart right now, priced at $23.99 during a 60% sale — down from $59.99. That’s 17,408 concurrent players in a game closing in on its tenth anniversary, still shipping major content updates, still climbing. Not bad for a title that launched as one of the most reviled releases in PC gaming history.

The Launch That Broke Trust

August 2016. Hello Games, a studio small enough to fit in a single room, released a game promising an infinite procedurally generated universe with multiplayer, diverse biomes, deep NPC factions, and boundless exploration. Over 210,000 players piled in at peak concurrency. Most of them left furious.

What they actually got was buggy, barren, and missing core features that had been prominently advertised. No multiplayer. No base building. No vehicles. Planets blurred together after the first few systems. NPC factions were skeletal at best. The silence from Hello Games in the weeks after launch compounded the damage — no roadmap, no clear communication, just a vacuum where promises used to live.

According to SteamDB data cited by Galaxus, only around 40% of the game’s 37,801 launch-month reviews were positive. That’s not a rough start. That’s the kind of catastrophe that buries studios permanently.

The Long Road Back

Here’s where the story pivots, and where Hello Games earned every shred of the goodwill it holds today.

November 2016: base building arrived. March 2017: exploration vehicles rolled in. July 2018: the NEXT update finally delivered the multiplayer that had been promised at reveal. Every single one of these updates was free. No microtransactions. No season pass. No $29.99 “sorry about the launch” DLC pack. Just patch notes, repeatedly, for years on end.

The recovery was slow and, by all appearances, genuine. Galaxus reports recent review averages sitting around 94% positive — remarkable for any game, let alone one carrying the baggage No Man’s Sky dragged through 2016. The overall average of 83% across 227,805 reviews is dragged down by tens of thousands of negative launch-era reviews. Hello Games has been fighting its own history on every review page.

When the game finally crossed into Steam’s “Very Positive” category, Sean Murray — Hello Games’ founder — posted on X: “Holy shit you guys - it happened” followed by a triple “Thank you” and the line “You have no idea what this means for us.” For a studio that went silent after the worst week of its professional life, the candor was pointed.

Xeno Arena and the Tenth Year

The game isn’t coasting on redemption. The Xeno Arena update, released this month, adds a creature-battling system — capture, breed, train, and battle wildlife with elemental affinities tied to their home planets. Rare variants, ranked leagues, seasonal rewards, player-hosted tournaments. Murray cited Pokémon, Palworld, and World of Warcraft pet battles as inspiration. It’s functionally an entire competitive game inside a space sim already overflowing with content.

At The Game Awards 2025, No Man’s Sky won Best Ongoing Game, beating Final Fantasy 14, Fortnite, Helldivers 2, and Marvel Rivals. It was also nominated for Best Community Support. Those aren’t sympathy votes. They’re recognition from an industry that watched a small studio do the hardest thing in live-service development: admit failure and spend years quietly, expensively fixing it.

The Real Price

So here’s the uncomfortable math. If No Man’s Sky at $23.99 is a Top 10 Steam seller with the depth it now offers — base building, multiplayer, vehicles, creature battling, infinite procedural space exploration, all without a single microtransaction — what exactly were players paying $59.99 for at launch?

Potential. That’s the honest answer. Players front-loaded the cost of a game that wouldn’t truly exist for several more years. Hello Games spent those years earning back every dollar without charging another cent. The $23.99 sale price isn’t a discount. It’s arguably what the game should have cost all along, given the state it was in at release.

One Steam reviewer with over 102 hours logged wrote: “I would pay $200 for this game and call it a steal.” Another, with 512.9 hours played, left a negative review over a persistent HUD bug that seemingly still hasn’t been addressed. Both assessments are fair. That’s the tension of a game built in public — always improving, never quite finished, always one update away from another twist in the narrative.

The sale is live. The game is worth it. And that Metacritic 61 isn’t wrong — it’s just a fossil from a version of No Man’s Sky that no longer exists.

Sources