No Man’s Sky Has Lost 78% of its Playerbase in its First Week on Steam

No Man’s Sky has been one of the most hyped up games of the past couple years… and with good reason. Hello Games’ ambitious idea to create a universe on par with the size of our own known universe in a video game was both beautiful and mind-blowing when teased in previews.

Last week’s launch proved that there was just as much hype among gamers as ever with No Man’s Sky bringing in an average of 212k players at its peak and becoming the biggest launch of 2016.

However, reactions among gamers since the launch have been very mixed and there have been a tremendous amount of technical issues reported by players on PC that have caused gamers to abandon their short trips to space.

GitHyp’s No Man’s Sky Player Count per Hour Data

Last Friday during the No Man Sky release, player counts peaked around 212k players on Steam. Almost doubling the prior top 3 launches of 2016: XCOM 2 – 132k peak launch players, Dark Souls III – 129k players, and The Division – 113k players.

And while No Man’s Sky has continued to stay in Steam’s top 5 most played games all week, it has been quickly hemorrhaging players with a 78% decrease from its highest peak 7 days ago of 212k players to its highest peak so far today of 47k players.

Hello Games’ dev team just released a patch today in an effort to try and quickly remedy many PC players’ problems, but at this point it might be too little too late and the other remaining issues and controversies surrounding the ambitious new title could turn 2016’s biggest launch into 2016’s biggest bomb.

Update: The player count numbers have dropped further down to 93% in the past two weeks since launch and the developers are now locking threads on Steam that source player count stats.

Update 2: The player count numbers have dropped even further down to 98% now a month after launch and the developers have remained silent since the original post date of this article.