'Holy s**t you guys—it happened': 8 years after a terrible launch, No Man's Sky has reached a Very Positive rating on Steam
Cyberpunk 2077 is often held up as the greatest redemption arc in videogame history, but I think No Man's Sky has a legitimate claim on the crown too. More than eight years after it landed with an ugly thud on Steam—a «supernova of negative backlash and disappointment,» as we put it at the time—Hello Games' sci-fi exploration epic has clawed its way up to a «very positive» rating on Steam.
The rating means that at least 80% of all user reviews of No Man's Sky are positive, and that's a far cry from the game's early days. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, this is what it looked like in August 2017, one year after No Man's Sky came out—positive reviews are coming in, but the overall rating is stuck in «mostly negative» thanks to the great, weighty mass of early negative reviews.
That's a massive mountain to climb, but Hello Games stuck with it, releasing bug fixes and major updates alike that slowly but surely made the game into what players had expected from it since the very beginning. It took five years and 17 free, «game-changing» updates to hoist the game into a «mostly positive» overall rating, and earlier in 2024 the next step on the ladder came within view: Hello Games head Sean Murray said in April, «I never thought it possible, but guys we might hit 'Very Positive' (80%) one day,» although he also cautioned that «mathematically each % point is much harder to gain than the last.»
And yet, here we are. «Holy shit you guys—it happened,» Murray wrote on X. «ALL REVIEWS: Very positive. Thank you thank you thank you. You have no idea what this means to us.»
It is, as we said earlier this year, «a great symbolic win» for Hello Games, but not really a game-changer in any practical sense. No Man's Sky is already a big sales success and widely regarded as an outstanding game: It's among the very few games to hold spots on our "worst launches" and "best games" lists at the same time. That Steam rating isn't going to have any real impact on the game's future fortunes,
Read more on pcgamer.com
