Hello Games’ Sean Murray: ‘I think there’s positivity around No Man’s Sky’

The vibe around No Man’s Sky has been changing. When the ambitious space exploration game first launched to outsized expectations back in 2016, many players were vocal in their disapproval, lamenting the state of the game via angry Reddit threads and negative Steam reviews. After that, the team at Hello Games largely went quiet, focusing on improving the game and letting their actions do the talking.

It seems to have worked. No Man’s Sky today is vastly different from the iteration that debuted two years ago, with new features like multiplayer, more varied worlds, and an intriguing quest structure. As these changes have come in, including the just-announced VR option, the conversation has largely shifted away from what the game should have been, and toward what it is right now.

“I think there’s positivity around No Man’s Sky that I’m always really appreciative of,” Hello’s Sean Murray told The Verge at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. “There’s a nice vibe around us. We’re doing stuff that makes us a little bit happy as well, we’re not too commercially driven on these things, and that seems to have worked so far.”

It’s not just anecdotal evidence. The most recent No Man’s Sky user reviews on Steam are “mostly positive,” compared to a “mixed” overall rating. People are also playing more. At launch, No Man’s Sky players spent an average of 25 hours with the game; after last year’s massive Next update, that jumped to 45 hours. The fact that people were playing so much, even during the rough early weeks, was part of what encouraged the team to keep pumping out new features and updates. “We were seeing the stats, and people were playing for a long time,” Murray says.

That consistent stream of updates has also led to a jump in sales. Without revealing specific numbers, Murray says that “Next sold the kinds of numbers that a AAA game would be happy about at launch,” which was not what the team expected. “My forecast was much lower than that,” he says. “We were two years out from launch and had quite modest expectations.”

With the upcoming No Man’s Sky: Beyond series of updates — which will include VR, expanded online multiplayer, and other unannounced features — there’s a clear business incentive to add more things to the game. As No Man’s Sky has gotten larger and more complex, more players have jumped aboard. And it’s the larger updates that are really driving users. “Foundation, which was the first one, did fine, but Next was a really big leap,” Murray says. “It seems to correlate with how long we spend on updates.”

According to Murray, though, that ongoing commercial success isn’t necessarily what’s driving himself nor the team at Hello. “We wanted the legacy of the game to be a positive one,” he says. “It kills me that the general narrative around it is that the team wasn’t hard-working, or that they’re lazy. It hurt me to see that. We wanted people to be proud of what they’ve done, and feel that they made a thing people like.”

It’s been a long road to get to that point, but more than two years after launch No Man’s Sky is in a good place. It’s both a commercial and critical success, and with expansions like Beyond in the works, the future looks bright.

“I don’t think you could’ve planned this journey,” says Murray.