The question of quality has been one that has permeated the gaming industry for quite some time now. The reason for that is certain developers have gone and released games “before it was their time,” and the results were a major backlash. One of the most ironic examples of this was No Man’s Sky by Hello Games. They had promised the gaming world that they would make one of the most expansive and deep universes ever for players to explore, alongside other promises that made the game seem “too good to be true.” As we would find out, it was too good to be true.
While the universe was big on the numbers scale, it didn’t have enough content to fill up that universe, and people got bored with the game quickly. As such, Hello Games spent years trying to fix, update, and overhaul the game so that they could truly make it what they promised. In the last few years, they’ve done that, and recently, dropped the 5.0 update that gave their universe a visual overall via the changing of how planets looked via their flora and fauna.
If you saw this update and wondered how many players came back or bought the game to check it out in its new form, the answer is…a lot. According to one source, No Man’s Sky almost had a 500% increase in players thanks to this singular update:
As the tweet notes, that jump was just for the PS5, but it’s possible that the update also brought in more players on other platforms, such as Steam, where the visual updating would’ve been just as noticeable. If nothing else, this proves to Hello Games that the great effort they put into this overhaul was worth it, given how many players were trying their title again. Seeing that big of a jump doesn’t happen every day, and that is something to celebrate.
Undoubtedly, Hello Games will try and build off of this momentum so that its title is able to maintain some of these new/returning players. That number will go down eventually, but it doesn’t have to stay down; that’s the key thing.
Hopefully, the plight and resurrection of this title will show developers and publishers that one cannot simply rush out a title with big promises unless you have the content to back it up. Sadly, we know that not everyone listened to that lesson the first time or even the second time. Still, we have hope.
