No Man’s Sky just launched on Mac with cross-play support

theverge.com:

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

No Man’s Sky is touching down on Macs starting today. Hello Games announced that the space adventure is available for Mac users on Steam now (it’ll be free if you already own the PC version), while the game will be coming to the Mac App Store “shortly.” The studio says the game will be “available on any Mac with Apple silicon” and will also be playable on “Intel-based Macs with a Core i5 processor.” The port will support both cross-save with PC and cross-play with players on PC, VR, and console (Switch not included).

Here’s how Hello describes the new version:

Expect fast loading times using the Mac internal SSD. Consistent performance across the full range of Macs is possible as we are one of the first titles to support MetalFX Upscaling (Temporal and Spatial). Metal 3 support allows No Man’s Sky to achieve console quality graphics whilst maintaining battery life on laptops and lower end devices.

If you’re keeping track, No Man’s Sky — which first launched in 2016 and has steadily grown and improved over the ensuing years — is now available on the Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, PlayStation 4, PS5, PC, and Nintendo Switch, and it also supports VR platforms, including the recently launched PSVR 2.

The Mac port was first announced at WWDC in 2022, and given that Apple is rumored to announce a VR headset at WWDC this year, it seems not all that unlikely that No Man’s Sky could eventually support the device. “We’ve worked closely with Apple to produce a version that feels at home on Mac,” Hello Games said in a press release. “This paves our way for an