“The hype machine”

No Man’s Sky could never have lived up to people’s expectations

On the day No Man’s Sky was released on PC, over 200,000 people were playing it on Steam. Two weeks later, the daily player count dropped to 14,000. These stats are by no means a scientific representation of the game’s popularity, but they perfectly illustrate its existence: a surging wave of excitement and hype, followed by a crash of ennui as people realized it wasn’t the game they were hoping it would be. We contributed to that wave, of course. In fact, I did personally. I wrote issue 278’s cover feature based on a visit to Hello Games’ tiny studio. I played an early build and listened to a sleep-deprived Sean Murray talk about his vision in an interview that, while interesting, was far too rambling and incoherent to print. And I was excited. It looked amazing!

Little did I know, what I saw on that visit was pretty much the entire game. I had no idea the core loop in No Man’s Sky would be so incredibly small, especially considering the infinite breadth of its universe. No one did. And although the player count for every game takes a sharp nosedive post-release (including giants like GTA and The Witcher), I think No Man’s Sky’s decline at least partly reflects people slowly realizing this.

If No Man’s Sky had been quietly released without all those years of Sony-funded marketing and promotion, I think people would have been a lot kinder to it. They wouldn’t have built it up so much, and it would have been a pleasant surprise rather than an inevitable disappointment. And I think the sting would have been taken out of its release if it was $30 rather than $60, because it really doesn’t feel it should be a full-price game yet.

The oversaturation of pre-release coverage—from our own previews and features to Murray’s appearance on Stephen Colbert’s talk show—ultimately did it a disservice. Keen to avoid spoiling the game, Murray was cryptic whenever he talked about it. And then people started filling in the blanks, inventing a game in their heads that never really existed in the first place. And how could Hello Games possibly ever live up to that?

sky’s not the limit

I’ve seen some stunnin g planets, but mostly a lot of quite dull, Earth-like ones