No Man’s Sky had one of the most controversial game launches and high-profile comebacks of the decade – you likely don’t need me to remind you – but lead developer Sean Murray says the weight of its botched launch didn’t lift until about three years later.
“We used to have a little running joke in the studio,” Murray says in an interview with GamesRadar+ to mark the space exploration sim’s 10th anniversary. Hello Games’ inside joke was that the team would put out one of their famously transformative updates, and each time, online coverage “would always [mention] the disastrous launch of No Man’s Sky” first. “Like that would be their opener, and then talk about the update.”
Rain or shine, Hello Games kept pumping out huge, free updates that added everything from new features (base-building, a proper narrative, multiplayer, etc) to general improvements to the game’s graphics or procedural generation, say. (Although, Murray still has fun playing No Man’s Sky’s original version.)
“I think it was about three years in and we had one article, and it never mentioned the launch. It just talked about the update, and honestly, I felt like a weight had lifted,” Murray continues. “Until that point, it felt like we were really trying to like, you know, update the game and maybe no one really wanted it or something like that.”
Before then, Hello Games felt like it was “fighting this real uphill battle” and releasing updates to an audience that sometimes received them with hostility. Things only became much clearer when the studio realized “that there’s a community who really loves the game.”
“But there was two or three years where it was a battle, where every time you posted about the game, every reply was laced with some slightly mean things and stuff like that,” he adds. “You felt like you were doing it almost against some people’s wishes or something… But over time, that changes, and… you learn who your community is and who your player base is.”