A Journey of Ten Years
On August 9, 2026, No Man's Sky will be exactly ten years old. During this time, the gaming industry has seen a new generation of consoles, experienced loud scandals and marketing disasters, and witnessed the rise and fall of dozens of service projects — from the ambitious Anthem to the stillborn Concord. However, the story of No Man's Sky still stands apart.
Ten years ago, the game was branded the "biggest scam of the year." It became a symbol of unfulfilled promises and developer lies. Today, No Man's Sky is seen as the gold standard for long-term support and one of the brightest examples of how real actions can restore shattered audience trust.
And this story began long before its release — with a childhood dream, a Christmas flood, and a small indie studio that once promised the whole world an infinite universe.
A Universe Born from a Childhood Dream
December 7, 2013. We are in the modest office of the British indie studio Hello Games in Guildford. Just a year ago, the team released the sequel to the racing arcade Joe Danger, but within hours of the first No Man's Sky trailer being shown at VGX — the predecessor to The Game Awards — this small "interest club" would be talked about worldwide.
Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games and lead developer of No Man's Sky, spent his childhood in the Australian outback, on an isolated ranch of about 400,000 hectares. Wild nature stretched all around, and small single-engine planes served as the primary means of transport. Children were taught from an early age to act in extreme situations and survive far from civilization, but the most powerful impression for Murray was the night sky — free from city lights, revealing an endless ocean of stars to his gaze.
This childhood fascination with space, amplified by the science fiction of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke with illustrations by Chris Foss, eventually grew into an ambitious concept. Murray was captivated by the idea of building an infinitely functioning model of the universe — a game where you could get into a spaceship, seamlessly take off from a planet, and travel to any point in the sky without loading screens, conventions, or boundaries.
Even while working on Joe Danger 2, he decided not to wait for the right moment. Murray feared that Hello Games would get bogged down in producing endless sequels, so for about a year, he secretly developed the mathematical engine for the future game, away from the main team. Then he gathered a group of four people within the company. Locked in a separate room, they set themselves the goal of bringing back the sense of true discovery to video games — to give people the opportunity to see a world no one had seen before.
The tool for realizing this dream was procedural generation — a system of deterministic algorithms capable of creating planets, flora, and fauna according to mathematical rules and initial numbers — "seeds." Initially, the engine used a 32-bit system, allowing for the generation of about 4.3 billion worlds. Later, the developers switched to a 64-bit format to demonstrate the scalability of the technology and increased the number of possible planets to 2⁶⁴, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616.
Murray calculated: if you visit one planet every second, it would take about 584 billion years to explore the entire universe. But before these numbers became a symbol of No Man's Sky's infinite scale, the small team faced a blow that threatened the existence of the entire project.
On Christmas Eve 2013, the River Wey overflowed its banks and completely flooded the Hello Games office. The water destroyed computers, furniture, and the developers' personal belongings. Insurance did not cover the damage, and Sean Murray seriously considered abandoning development. Thus, the studio, which had just promised the world an endless universe, found itself on the verge of physical destruction overnight.
From a Flooded Office to the E3 Stage
But the disaster that should have buried Hello Games acted as a catharsis. The studio had long been divided into two camps: those who supported the Joe Danger franchise and a small group whispering about a secret space game. Rebuilding the destroyed office side by side, the developers finally united. The team realized they had nothing left to lose and threw all their efforts into No Man's Sky.
Shahid Kamal Ahmed, who oversaw the indie segment of Sony's European division, could have been a lifeline for the studio. He saw the game's potential even before the first teasers, and the corporation itself needed high-profile projects for the newly released PlayStation 4. Sony offered Hello Games financial assistance, but Murray took a risk and refused the money: he didn't want to become corporately dependent again, as he had during his time at EA. Instead, Murray negotiated marketing support from Sony — and a spot on the main company presentation stage at E3 2014.
Thanks to this decision, on June 9, 2014, the project of the tiny team from Guildford found itself on the same stage as Destiny, Batman: Arkham Knight, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. For the gaming industry, this was an important precedent: previously, games from independent studios had not appeared at Sony's central press conference.
The trailer and Murray's short speech caused a sensation. The whole world opened up to Hello Games, and with it came immense pressure. Invitations poured in for Sean from all sides — from The Guardian and The New Yorker to specialized podcasts and "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert." But, stepping into the spotlight, Sean Murray found himself in a role for which he, as a software engineer, was unprepared. He had no PR training, didn't know how to avoid tricky questions, and his sincere, naive enthusiasm ultimately played a cruel trick on him.
Murray was asked hundreds of questions about "what you could do in the game," and he, driven by enthusiasm, gave dreamy answers like: "we're thinking about it," "possibly," "we'd like to." Often, he simply agreed with interviewers' assumptions: "Can players meet each other?" — "Yes, but the chance of that is incredibly small due to the size of the universe."
Murray spoke with equal enthusiasm about both implemented features and mechanics, and those that existed only as concepts or future plans. And he did so with the excitement of a person who decided to share his dream with the whole world. However, the public and journalists perceived everything said as a guaranteed set of features at launch. Interest flared to the limit, turning No Man's Sky into one of the most anticipated games of the generation and simultaneously tightening an imaginary noose around the developers' necks.
18 Quintillion Bowls of Oatmeal
By August 2016, players were expecting a full-fledged cosmic metaverse from an independent studio, where they could live for years. An endless explorer simulator with massive space fleet battles, a complex economy, advanced physics, giant sand worms, and billions of unique ecosystems.
Pre-release madness peaked two weeks before launch. A Reddit user named daymeeuhn paid about $1300 on eBay for a leaked pre-release copy of No Man's Sky — more than twenty standard editions. Upon receiving the disc, he immediately began uploading gameplay videos and reached the center of the galaxy in just thirty hours. This caused the first serious wave of panic in the community: the final goal, which Murray had intrigued the audience with for years, turned out to be suspiciously quickly achievable. The developer had to urgently appeal to players via Twitter, asking them not to spoil the game for themselves and to wait for the official launch.
No Man's Sky was released on August 9 for PlayStation 4, and on August 12, it reached PC. By the standards of the time, the launch was colossal: peak online players on Steam exceeded 212,000. Retail and digital sales soared, and Murray's dream seemed to have come true. In the first hours, the magic truly worked. The player woke up near a crashed ship, searched for ferrite and carbon, patched the engine, broke through the clouds, and for the first time burst into open space without a loading screen.
But then the algorithm began to repeat itself, and it quickly became clear that instead of well-developed worlds, players received 18 quintillion bowls of bland oatmeal — desolate, monotonous planets, differing from each other mainly in color scheme, climate, and absurd creatures chaotically assembled from a set of procedurally combined elements.
In addition, the game met its audience in a catastrophic technical state. No Man's Sky literally fell apart before their eyes: it suffered from serious performance issues even on powerful graphics cards, crashed regularly, and players complained about critical bugs and save problems. In the very first days, Hello Games' support was overwhelmed with requests, and the game's rating on Steam quickly plummeted below 50% and continued to fall.
Along with it, the last illusion collapsed — the idea of a "unified cosmos." On the very first day of release, a player named TheSadCactus accidentally landed on a planet already discovered by another user, Psytokat. Communicating on PSN, they decided to conduct an experiment: they launched parallel streams on Twitch and agreed to meet at the same outpost. They stood literally at the same spot, looking at the same building walls, but never saw each other. The planet looked the same, one player's discoveries were displayed for the other, but even the time of day differed in their versions of the world.
Murray tried to smooth things over on Twitter, writing a vague post about "servers being overloaded" and that "the fact that two players met on the first day blows his mind." But the public no longer believed the explanations. A thread immediately formed on Reddit where enthusiasts meticulously compared promises from Murray's interviews with the actual content of the game and dissected the author's vague or contradictory statements.
The negativity surrounding the release instantly went beyond ordinary gaming dissatisfaction. In an interview with The Guardian, Sean Murray recalled that it escalated to open death threats and reports of bombs in the Hello Games office, forcing the studio to work in direct contact with Scotland Yard and London police. The details made the situation absurd: one death threat came to Murray because of butterflies — a fan was enraged that insects were in an early trailer but absent in the release version. Sean himself, two years later, ironically suggested that a person wishing death over butterflies "might be a villain himself," but at release, every such threat was taken seriously.
In addition, Steam began processing refunds even for users who had played No Man's Sky for more than two hours. On Reddit, there were mentions of cases where players returned the game after dozens of hours — 72 and even 88 — citing misleading buyers. Refunds were even approved on PSN, where such a practice was even rarer then than it is now.
However, while everything was collapsing, the studio was patching the code. On August 18, Murray tweeted that the team was fully focused on technical support, and on the same day, the PC version received its first post-release patch 1.04. Over the next month, the developers released five more hotfixes in a row, correcting critical errors, restoring broken saves, and improving game mechanics. On September 18, update 1.09 was released, closing further critical holes — and at that point, the conveyor belt of emergency fixes stopped.
Just a few days after this, the British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) launched an official investigation against Hello Games and Valve due to misleading screenshots and trailers on the game's Steam page. And although the regulator later found no direct violations of the law, the very fact of a government inquiry became another nail in the coffin of the studio's reputation.
The studio did not issue a press release with rebuttals or comments to the media — the developers simply ignored the investigation in the public sphere. For the disappointed community, this informational silence looked like the ultimate betrayal. The community was convinced that Hello Games had released a few emergency fixes "for show," taken tens of millions of dollars from initial sales, closed the studio, and dispersed to tropical islands.
Defensive Stance
But this silence became part of a strategy that determined the future fate of Hello Games. We are used to companies usually following a single pattern in crisis situations. When a project fails, senior management issues a public apology letter ("We hear you," "We have not met your expectations"), publishes a roadmap of future patches, and begins to give conciliatory interviews, appease the audience with promises, and butter them up with bonuses. Hello Games did the exact opposite — it simply fell silent.
Sean Murray, who gave five interviews a day before the release, practically disappeared from the public eye after August 18, and following the first wave of patches, the studio's official social media accounts also went silent. The only loud reminder of Hello Games was the hacking of its Twitter account in October 2016, when a post appeared there: "No Man's Sky was a mistake." Murray had to briefly emerge from the shadows to explain the situation, after which he again disappeared from the information space.
All this time, behind the closed doors of the Guildford office, exhausting work was underway. Murray did exactly what he had been accustomed to doing since childhood when faced with difficulties: he immersed himself in work, preferring not to waste time on empty arguments. From now on, the project's right to exist could only be proven by action. For three months, the studio maintained a defensive stance — no posts, no interviews, no reaction to hate. And in late November 2016, Hello Games quietly rolled out the Foundation Update (patch 1.1).
The name of the update — "Foundation" — was not chosen for a pretty word. The studio literally overhauled the game's engine and mathematics: it reworked generation algorithms, terrain, object distribution, and lighting, making the worlds look more vibrant and diverse. Survival and creative modes appeared, as well as base building mechanics and personal freighter ships. Of course, the update didn't fix the project completely, but players received a crucial psychological signal: the developers hadn't run off with the money, but stayed in the office and continued to work. This was the first stone laid in the foundation of a new No Man's Sky.
In March 2017, the Pathfinder update (1.2) was released, adding planetary vehicles, racing tracks, improved graphics, trading, and ship specialization. And immediately after that, Hello Games elegantly complicated the "no words — only patches" formula.
The studio still didn't give interviews or make promises, but it offered the audience a fundamentally new language of communication by launching Waking Titan — a large-scale ARG (alternate reality game) — in the summer of 2017. Encrypted websites, special radio broadcasts, phone numbers, cassettes sent to players, actors, and real-world events in various cities combined into a huge collective quest. This move attracted the attention of fans and specialized media, as well as newcomers: instead of direct advertising, the developers invited players to solve a mystery together.
The first season of Waking Titan eventually led the community to the Atlas Rises update (1.3), which was released in August 2017 — just in time for the first anniversary of the release. The patch brought a new 30-hour story campaign to the game, a system of procedural guild assignments, ancient portals, a reworked economy, and the first glimmer of the long-awaited multiplayer — cooperative space exploration, in which other players appeared as floating glowing spheres. The foundation was laid, but the real turning point, which completely changed the perception of the game, was still ahead.
The Day No Man's Sky Was Reborn
On July 24, 2018 — almost two years after its release — Hello Games released the massive No Man's Sky NEXT update, version 1.5. The path to it was paved by the second season of Waking Titan, which had been building hype for several months and made even those unfamiliar with the game talk about it. And if previous patches — Foundation, Pathfinder, and Atlas Rises — only laid the groundwork, NEXT literally built the game to the state that was expected of it at its 2016 release.
The main breakthrough was the long-awaited full-fledged multiplayer, in which players finally ceased to be disembodied "glowing spheres." The community gained the ability to team up with friends or meet strangers, complete the story campaign together, survive, build shared bases, and fight space pirates. The update also expanded building capabilities, reworked crafting and the visual appearance of worlds, added character customization, and a third-person camera.
The release of NEXT coincided with the long-awaited launch of No Man's Sky on Xbox One, and online players on Steam jumped from approximately 2,000 to 90,000 concurrent players. The game was once again talked about everywhere, attracting a new audience that hadn't experienced the 2016 scandals. At that time, "recent" reviews on Steam climbed out of the "negative" zone for the first time in the project's history and settled into "positive."
Gaming publications, which had recently published scathing reviews, now greeted the update with headlines like "No Man's Sky is finally the game we were promised" and sometimes called NEXT a full-fledged sequel. Before millions of eyes, one of the gaming industry's loudest scandals was transforming into an impressive story of redemption.
From Hatred to Love
Along with the game itself, its audience also changed. The No Man's Sky community on Reddit went from a toxic cauldron to one of the most friendly and cohesive gaming communities in a few years. Users began to build their own virtual civilizations. The most famous example is the "Galactic Hub," an association of thousands of players who voluntarily settled in one region of the procedural universe, established trade, developed their own rules, and began to conduct joint expeditions.
But the main symbol of this incredible transformation was the events of summer 2019. In anticipation of a major Beyond update, Reddit user Cam G organized a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe. The initial goal was to raise $1750 to rent a billboard near the Hello Games office. The necessary amount was raised in just eight hours, and the total raised exceeded $6000.
Part of the money went to a billboard with the inscription "Thank You, Hello Games," as well as lunch and a case of beer for the team. The remaining funds were directed to the Sydney Children's Hospitals Foundation. They purchased eight sets with PlayStation 4s, PS Plus subscriptions, headsets, additional controllers, charging stations, and copies of No Man's Sky for children's hospitals.
Sean Murray was photographed in front of the billboard, and a few days later, fans of the game gathered near it for a group photo. Murray later admitted that for the team, who had gone through years of harassment and continuous work, this gesture from fans was one of the most touching moments throughout the development of No Man's Sky.
The Economy of Redemption
When analyzing the No Man's Sky case, it's impossible to ignore its financial model, which is unique in modern game development. In an era where even single-player AAA games are acquiring in-game stores, battle passes, paid skins, and subscriptions, Hello Games embarked on an unusual experiment.
Over ten years, the studio has released more than fifty major updates and special expeditions for No Man's Sky, as well as over a hundred fixes, hotfixes, and intermediate patches. Listing each of them could take until the next anniversary, but that's not why we're here. It's more important to answer the question: what united all the updates and patches released over these years? Hello Games didn't ask players for a single cent. If you open the No Man's Sky page on Steam, you'll only find the standard edition for $60 or less — depending on the region.
This system seems anomalous, but its success rests on perfectly logical pillars: continuous audience expansion and cost control. Hello Games has optimized the engine for years and consistently ported the game to new devices: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, VR headsets, including PS VR2, and Apple computers.
Moreover, every major free update becomes a significant news event, starts word-of-mouth, and regularly brings No Man's Sky back to the top of sales charts. Old players return, purchase the game on new platforms, generate an information wave, and attract new gamers.
At the same time, Hello Games has not transformed into a cumbersome corporation with thousands of employees over these ten years. The Guildford office has grown but maintained the format of an independent team of approximately 40-50 people. The absence of an inflated staff, external investors, and multi-million dollar advertising budgets allowed the studio to support the project for years without aggressive monetization.
Thanks to all this, in November 2024, Hello Games closed its main gestalt — the cumulative user reviews of No Man's Sky on Steam rose to the "very positive" category for the first time in eight years, finally overcoming the lingering negativity from its release. In 2025, the Voyagers update once again gathered over 110,000 concurrent players on Steam — the best result since the catastrophic release.
Even the industry, which once watched Hello Games' downfall as a cautionary failure, eventually recognized its success. In 2022, No Man's Sky received a BAFTA award in the Evolving Game category — "Best Evolving Project," and four years later, in 2026, another in the same nomination. Thus, in ten years, the project transformed from the generation's biggest disappointment into one of the prime examples of how a game should evolve after release.
“We’ve been working on No Man’s Sky for ten years, and honestly, I f***ing love it. I adore it. I really, really love my job, and for me, that’s more than enough. Although sometimes it’s hard. Making games, as you all know, is sometimes really, really difficult. So these moments are beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you to the team, thank you to our community — we really appreciate it. Thank you.”
Looking Beyond the Horizon
The ten-year history of No Man's Sky is a parable of responsibility, redemption, and workaholism. It showed that in the gaming industry, the final result and respect for the audience truly matter. Over these years, we have seen different scenarios unfold after failed releases. On one hand — Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout 76, whose creators managed to climb out of a reputational hole. On the other — BioWare's Anthem and Square Enix's Babylon's Fall, which clearly demonstrated that large publishers are much more willing to shut down unsuccessful services than to perfect them for years for free.
Against this backdrop, Sean Murray's main lesson for the entire industry sounds extremely simple: lost trust cannot be bought with money. It is regained through fanatical devotion to one's own idea, a willingness to forget ego, and the ability to correct mistakes through work, not apology letters.
Today, in August 2026, Hello Games looks to the future with its head held high. The studio's new ambitious project — Light No Fire — is perceived by the public quite differently than No Man's Sky once was. Yes, the studio is once again offering a provocatively ambitious concept: a single fantasy planet the size of real Earth, mountains of realistic scale, deep oceans, dragons, and a seamless procedural world.
But if thirteen years ago Murray's promises were backed only by raw enthusiasm and formulas on paper, now he has colossal experience and a ready testing ground in the form of No Man's Sky. Sean no longer gives loud interviews or rushes release dates. He silently tests future technologies in his main game. And it's easy to believe in this new dream for one simple reason: players now know that even if Murray stumbles somewhere, he won't run away. He'll just close the Twitter tab, stay in the office, and finish the job.