No Man’s Sky didn’t get off to the smoothest of starts, but eight years after its controversial launch, Hello Games’ exploratory space sim has reached a significant milestone, finally gaining enough favourable player reviews on Steam to shift its overall rating to “Very Positive”.
When No Man’s Sky released back in August 2016, player sentiment was such that it quickly found itself damned with an “Overwhelming Negative” rating on Steam. It took two years and a number of significant updates for No Man’s Sky to secure enough positive reviews that its average tipped over to “Mixed”, and then a further three years after to that to reach an all-time user review average of “Mostly Positive” in 2021.
As Hello Games’ Tim Woodley explained at the time, “Each percentage point becomes exponentially harder to earn as you move up the ratings. Moving from 20 percent positive to 21 percent positive may only require a few hundred positive reviews whereas moving from 69 percent to 70 percent needed 10,000 positive reviews. This is why it’s so rare for games to change their All-Time rating and why we’d assumed that we might never be able to.”
Another three years – and a total of 35 free content updates – later, No Man’s Sky has finally achieved the seemingly impossible, turning its initial “Overwhelmingly Negative” rating into “Very Positive”. That means 80 percent of its 245,857 Steam reviews are positive – which is to says it’s secured 196,686 blue thumbs up versus 49,171 red thumbs down. Addressing the milestone, studio boss Sean Murray wrote, “Holy shit you guys – it happened. ALL REVIEWS: Very Positive. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You have no idea what this means to us.”
No Man’s Sky’s next challenge, then, will be to nudge into the prestigious “Overwhelming Postive” category inhabited by the likes of Sekiro, Persona 5, Baldur’s Gate 3, Stardew Valley, Hades, Dead Cells, the Silent Hill 2 remake, and Half-Life: Alyx. That’s a significantly tougher goal, however, requiring 95 percent of life-time reviews to be positive. In other words, assuming No Man’s Sky doesn’t receive a single negative review from this point forward, it’ll need a total of 983,420 positive reviews – or 786,734 more than it has now. By which point the actual universe might be 16 minutes away from obliteration.
Regardless, the shift to “Very Positive” is still an incredible achievement, and testament to the incredible work Hello Games has put into its space sim over the last eight years. No Man’s Sky’s most recent update released earlier this month, introducing cross-save support, PlayStation 5 Pro enhancements, and the return of Mass Effect’s Normandy. It’s the sixth major update this year, following on from October’s spooky The Cursed (which, among other things, introduced flying saucer ships for players), while other 2024 additions have included fishing, refreshed space stations, and a massive world generation overhaul.
Up next for Hello Games is its procedural planet adventure Light No Fire, which we’ve not had an update on since last year’s reveal. Perhaps we’ll finally see more during December’s The Game Awards, but regardless, it sounds like No Man’s Sky journey is far from over.
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