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The little indie game that saw its hype grow to galactic proportions, No Man’s Sky, became the highest played new game of 2016 when it peaked at 212k concurrent players on Steam last year.
But one week after the controversial launch, No Man’s Sky saw its player counts plummet by a stunning 78%. Then less than two months after launch, 94% of NMS’ playerbase was sadly gone.
Things looked grim for Hello Games with all the negative feedback, refunds, and even lawsuits being thrown at the team while the game’s creator Sean Murray stayed silent. But before 2016 was over, the developers returned with NMS’ first big update that spiked the player counts by 10x to a peak of 8k players.
No Man’s Sky Peak Concurrent Players on Steam via GitHyp
While the base-building update helped No Man’s Sky show signs of life after the playerbase flatlined, the numbers quickly dropped back down to under 1k concurrent players. Three months later, a second big content update was released. It too brought back a similar peak of 7k players. It too dropped back down to under 1k players per hour a month later.
More recently, No Man’s Sky was discounted by 60% to $24 during the Steam Summer Sale. Yet, despite over half off the price, the player counts barely doubled during the sale. And once again, the gains were short-lived with the playerbase returning to its same core of 500-1,000 concurrent players, down over 99% from its launch day peak.
With the upcoming 1-year anniversary of No Man’s Sky, an alternate reality game called “Project Walking Titan” has lead die-hard fans on a treasure hunt hoping for new races, portals, and/or multiplayer. But at this point, it’s hard to see how even the inclusion of multiplayer could ever return No Man’s Sky anywhere near its former Day 1 glory.