No Man’s Sky didn’t get off to the smoothest of starts, but eight years after its controversial launch, Hello Games’ exploratory space sim has reached a significant milestone, finally gaining enough favourable player reviews on Steam to shift its overall rating to “Very Positive”.
When No Man’s Sky released back in August 2016, player sentiment was such that it quickly found itself damned with an “Overwhelming Negative” rating on Steam. It took two years and a number of significant updates for No Man’s Sky to secure enough positive reviews that its average tipped over to “Mixed”, and then a further three years after to that to reach an all-time user review average of “Mostly Positive” in 2021.
As Hello Games’ Tim Woodley explained at the time, “Each percentage point becomes exponentially harder to earn as you move up the ratings. Moving from 20 percent positive to 21 percent positive may only require a few hundred positive reviews whereas moving from 69 percent to 70 percent needed 10,000 positive reviews. This is why it’s so rare for games to change their All-Time rating and why we’d assumed that we might never be able to.”
Another three years – and a total of 35 free content updates – later, No Man’s Sky has finally achieved the seemingly impossible, turning its initial “Overwhelmingly Negative” rating into “Very Positive”. That means 80 percent of its 245,857 Steam reviews are positive – which is to says it’s secured 196,686 blue thumbs up versus 49,171 red thumbs down. Addressing the milestone, studio boss Sean Murray wrote, “Holy shit you guys – it happened. ALL REVIEWS: Very Positive. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You have no idea what this means to us.”