No Man’s Sky Dev Hello Games Hails ‘Very Positive’ Steam Rating 8 Years After ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ Launch

No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has hailed hitting a ‘very positive’ Steam user review user rating for the first time, eight years after the game’s controversial launch was slammed by players.

Space sim No Man’s Sky launched in August 2016 on PS4 and PC to tens of thousands of negative reviews on Steam, with players complaining about broken promises and a lack of meaningful content, particularly on the multiplayer side. The game quickly settled on the dreaded ‘overwhelmingly negative’ Steam user review rating, a clear sign to anyone who visited its Steam page that something was very wrong.

But Guildford, England-based Hello Games has continued to update No Man’s Sky over the years, improving player sentiment to the point where it is now considered superb. It took two years to hit ‘mixed,’ then another three to hit ‘mostly positive.’ At the time, five years after launch, Tim Woodley, Head of Publishing at Hello Games, explained how hard it was to claw back Steam user reviews from such a low base.

“Over the last five years we’ve moved from ‘overwhelmingly negative’ to ‘mostly positive,’ it’s an incredible achievement for the team,” he said.

“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).

“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.

“Each percentage point becomes exponentially harder to earn as you move up the ratings. Moving from 20% positive to 21% positive may only require a few hundred positive reviews whereas moving from 69% to 70% 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.”

Now, three years after that milestone, No Man’s Sky is on ‘very positive.’ Next stop, ‘overwhelmingly positive?’

https://t.co/hQcPpQ8ILM pic.twitter.com/69AjoB48NY

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) November 28, 2024

Hello Games chief Sean Murray, who had come under fire upon Hello Games’ launch for failing to deliver on features he’d talked up in pre-release interviews, hailed the game’s new Steam user review rating. “Holy shit you guys – it happened,” he tweeted. “ALL REVIEWS: Very Positive. Thank you Thank you Thank you. You have no idea what this means to us.”

As Hello Games continues to work on No Man’s Sky, it’s developing its next game, Light No Fire. It’s about adventure, building, survival and exploration together, set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].