Hello Games marked No Man's Sky's 10th anniversary by saying players have explored less than 1% of its planets, a number that lands with unusual force for a game that launched 10 years ago and still feels almost untouched. Sean Murray said he felt surprisingly emotional on the milestone, and he added that this year has brought the game's highest player numbers since launch.
That is why No Man's Sky is being searched now: the scale is still the story. The game launched on August 9, 2016 on PS4 and PC with over 18 quintillion planets, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 if you want the full count, and Hello Games once told IGN before release that it would take 585 billion years to see them all. Even after a decade, the universe remains so large that less than 1% explored is not a marketing line, but a measurement of how much of it has never been visited.
Murray's anniversary note also carries a quiet weight because No Man's Sky did not begin as a triumph. It drew tens of thousands of negative Steam reviews at launch and settled into an overwhelmingly negative user rating before slowly climbing to mixed, then mostly positive, and now very positive. In the years since, Hello Games has kept adding free updates, 40 major ones in all, while widening the sandbox with base-building, exocraft, settlements, mechs, pets, living ships and expeditions.
That long run is also what makes the new tease matter. Hello Games has now hinted at Cosmos, the next No Man's Sky update, but it has not said when it will arrive. The studio is also working on Light No Fire, revealed at The Game Awards 2023 and set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth, which leaves Cosmos as the immediate question for No Man's Sky players: how much more can still be added to a universe that most of its own community has barely touched?
