No Man’s Sky has now been out for 8 years and has officially been reviewed as “Very Positive” on Steam. On the 5 year anniversary of the release of Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky, head of publishing, Tim Woodley, commented on how far the team and the game come since its disappointing release in 2016.
Over the last five years we’ve moved from ‘overwhelmingly negative’ to ‘mostly positive,’ it’s an incredible achievement for the team.
Moving to ‘mixed’, which may seem funny to celebrate, took two years of hard work. Moving from ‘mixed’ to ‘mostly positive’ has taken the last three years (knowing that any small mistake along the way may result in backlash and negative reviews).
Woodley would go on to discuss how excited the team was after the news hit on the 5 year anniversary after improving upon the game with free updates for all that time.
In some ways, it’s easy to dismiss Steam reviews, it’s a bit of meme to share the silly ones, but as a developer, they are undeniably meaningful. For five years now if someone bought No Man’s Sky they had to do it in spite of a red or yellow warning symbol beside our name (and affecting the likelihood algorithm in charge of displaying the name in the first place).
The team is really chuffed today at hitting this milestone but we also owe a huge thank you to the community, the players, but also folks like yourself who continue to support us to do this work we enjoy.
Now 3 years past that milestone, Hello Games chief, Sean Murray tweeted the now upgraded “Very Positive” reviews of No Man’s Sky, saying: “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.”