No Man’s Sky launched on Aug. 9, 2016, exactly 10 years ago today. On release, it was berated and hated by just about everyone, not least because its lead developer, Sean Murray, made a bucketload of promises he knew could not be fulfilled. But it’s a whole different story now. With a decade of constant, free, massive updates, No Man’s Sky stands as one of the most unique and content-rich games ever made, with developer Hello Games never asking a dime out of its player base outside of the initial purchase. For a while, though, No Man’s Sky was one of the lowest-rated games on Steam, with only about 20 percent positive reviews overall. Most people were disappointed with what they got (for $60, mind you) or, rather, the lack of content or basically anything that was promised in the game’s many trailers and Sean Murray’s frequent public appearances and speeches. Planets whose climate changes based on their proximity to their star, or the type of star they’re orbiting? Nope. Realistic monsters and biomes? Not there. The ability to manually fly between systems? Nada. So many different things were spoken of, planned, promised, and yet never, ever in the game. And Hello Games was well aware of that. No Man’s Sky today would be completely unrecognizable if shown to people in 2016. Image via Hello Games For whatever reason, though, Murray continued hyping the game up, and once it dropped, people finally saw that it was all just smoke and mirrors. It took only a month for No Man’s Sky to lose over 95 percent of its launch player base, dropping from over 212,000 to just 9,000 in the matter of weeks. The decline would continue until NMS reached barely 1,000 concurrents, with Hello Games going radio silent on every single social media platform. No one knew what the fate of this game was going to be, and many expected that harrowing announcement that Hello Games is shutting down and taking No Man’s Sky out with it. But they were all of them deceived. Murray and the team decided social media was their greatest enemy and ignored it completely while giving their all to the game and its first of many updates. By 2017 things started to slowly pick up pace, and about 20,000 folks clocked in following Foundation, Pathfinder, and Atlas Rises, but it wouldn’t be before 2018 and the now-famous NEXT update that No Man’s Sky would start its stellar redemption journey. Then came Abyss and Visions, and then Beyond reinvigorated the game and got it to nearly 100,000 concurrents. Later followed Synthesis and Living Ship, and literally dozens of more updates, all completely free of charge, bringing us to No Man’s Sky in 2026. It’s not as big, nor did it ever reach the same height as on its launch day, but it truly stands as one of the greatest redemption stories ever told. It also now has an 85 percent positive review score on Steam, up from some 20 percent it had in 2016. Forty-two total updates have been released in this last decade, and I’m willing to bet that Hello Games has something planned for its 10-year anniversary. Sean Murray’s been emotionally engaging with the NMS community all day today, and while he kind of dug the hole the game found itself in, he’s definitely filled it in and built a whole hotel complex on top. I sincerely hope Hello Games’ next project ends up being a tremendous success, as it has more than proven itself with its No Man’s Sky experience, itself summarized perfectly in one of the best videos about this topic ever made, which I’m embedding below. The post Today, No Man’s Sky celebrates a decade since its launch, and boy has it come a long way appeared first on Destructoid.