No Man’s Sky is Back in Steam’s Top 10 Most Played Games

With a peak of 212k concurrent players back in August 2016, No Man’s Sky had one of the biggest launches of any game over the past few years on Steam.

Sadly, shallow gameplay and missing features like multiplayer resulted in the player base instantly declining. And within 1 month, there were under 1k concurrent players left playing No Man’s Sky.

Sean Murray and his team at Hello Games stayed silent during the games troubled launch. But surprisingly, as players requested refunds and even threatened lawsuits, the dev team kept working on adding more features, believing that their actions would eventually speak louder than words.

Now, after a couple other big updates that have added new features such as base-building, ground vehicles, and extra modes, No Man’s Sky has released its biggest update yet. And with the “NEXT” update, Hello Games has finally delivered on the most requested feature since launch… multiplayer!

Yep, No Man’s Sky has finally introduced real 4-player co-op multiplayer where you can actually see other players in-game — and even see yourself now in third person. As a result, more players than ever have returned to give the game another shot, and so far, the reviews have switched from mostly negative to very positive on Steam.

Peaking at 43k concurrent players yesterday, No Man’s Sky has cracked Steam’s top 10 most played games once again at #8. Currently ahead of popular games such as ARK, Rocket League, and Fallout 4, this latest update is the best NMS has done since launching at #3 on Steam two years ago.

Yesterday’s peak easily doubled NMS’ previous post-launch peak of 19k players last August when Hello Games released the game’s 1-year anniversary update, Atlas Rises. A promising update that still lacked a true multiplayer experience which lead to the numbers dwindling back down to an average of less than 1k players each hour as players in 2018.

The hype that the NEXT update has brought back to No Man’s Sky will likely die back down just as it has already multiple times already for the game. But it’s still good to see that both gamers and the developers aren’t giving up on No Man’s Sky. And with multiplayer now added, the game discounted 50% off, and free weekly content on the way, players certainly have a reason to stick around a little longer than before.

Update: Just a few days after this article was published, No Man’s Sky’s growth continued, hitting 97k concurrent players on Steam.