No Man's Sky finally has a 'very positive' rating on Steam after 8 years

No Man's Sky has finally overcome its less-than-nominal launch and reached a Very Positive rating on Steam, Hello Games founder Sean Murray announced on X. The rating means that 80 percent of the nearly 246,000 Steam reviews are positive. "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."

Many of No Man's Sky early reviews, Engadget's included, were along the lines of "this game looks great but it has a ton of issues." Those included the lack of a hyperdrive on new ships, resource glitches and multiplayer problems. At the same time, we called it "gorgeous, technically astounding, innovative and engaging."

Despite the many positives, No Man's Sky was saddled with an "Overwhelming Negative" rating on Steam shortly after launch. After two years it reached the "Mixed" level and hit "Mostly Positive" in 2021. "Each percentage point becomes exponentially harder as you move up the ratings," Murray said at the time. "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."

It went on to become a success with more than 10 million units sold, but users have argued that the game set a bad precedent. It was still somewhat unusual in 2016 to shell out $60 for a semi-broken game. Since it continued to sell, studios may have taken the wrong message that it's okay to release unfinished titles (Cyberpunk 2077, Overwatch 2, Halo Infinite, etc.) and fix them later. Still, no one can say that Hello Games didn't put in the work to get to this level, issuing no less than 35 free content updates over the last three years.