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

ign.com:

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