No Man’s Sky has turned a corner with the launch of it’s multiplayer update this week. With the launch of NEXT, player numbers surged upward. The game jumped to nearly 42,000 players yesterday, which is a huge improvement from the ~2,000 players that determined the average post-launch.
While the jump is big, it’s still a far cry from the 200,000+ the game saw at launch. Although it’s not hard to see why this update helped turn things around. The addition of third-person gameplay, co-op multiplayer, unlimited base building and a host of other new and requested features seems to have brought players flying back to the open-world game with the NEXT update.
The 1.5 update has also seen the launch of the Galactic Atlas – a website made for the community which will show points-of-interest, hubs, and more events.
All of these stats are available on Steam Charts, but you don’t even need that much data to know that No Man’s Sky is popular again.
But it’s not all good news for No Man’s Sky. GOG gamers got skipped over with the NEXT update. No Man’s Sky developers Hello Games issued a joint statement with GOG when Next launched yesterday:
“From launch, the DRM-free edition of No Man’s Sky will include all single-player content introduced by NEXT: third-person mode, upgraded visuals, better base building, player customisation, and more.
“However the multiplayer component will not be ready at launch; we expect it to be released later this year as full multiplayer parity remains in the pipeline.
“For a small, independent studio, developing the feature across multiple platforms is a hugely ambitious and technical challenge which resulted in this delayed release. Hello Games is however joining forces with GOG.COM to introduce full multiplayer via the GOG Galaxy platform.”
Which sucks. Given that GOG is the superior platform, mostly due to both the lack of DRM and the quality of games on the service, it’s sad that it gets pushed to the back burner like this.
No Man’s Sky is 50% off on Steam until July 28.
