This might be unpopular, but it feels like the “redemption” story around No Man’s Sky has become more of a cultural comfort narrative than an honest look at what happened.
Let’s be real — most of those updates were just delivering delayed promises, not generosity. The game we were originally sold was missing a lot of advertised features, and Hello Games never actually apologized for lying. On top of that, every update brings more bugs and half-fixed systems, and the community acts like free beta testers for Light No Fire, while still framing it all as “passion” and “commitment.”
It’s like Hello Games built a shoddy, unfinished building, declared it open anyway, and then decided to use it as a testing ground for their next building — and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.
So why do people keep buying into this narrative? Because it’s a comfortable story? Or is it somekind of parasocial relationship going on there?
NMS made 78 million in 2016, this can’t be compared to a failed AAA game or indies where devs walk away from financial failure, another emotional argument?
According to the number of upvotes, it seems that their angst is a reflection of the game industry in general. Hello Games had indeed performed to expectations by not walking away, but does that warrant mythologising the redemption arc? Even when the state of the game is buggy?
Delivering on delayed promises is more than most game companies will ever do. Their actions in fixing and adding to the game is the apology. Every update does bring bugs but you say this like the game is in an unplayable state. It’s perfectly fine 99% of the time and the 1% it’s not is usually fixed within the week. As a day 1 owner who could barely run the game on launch it’s come so fucking far. It literally took half an hour for the game to boot during those early days. There wasn’t much to do on top of that. The systems were confusing and the game would crash almost every time you booted it. Everything has been fixed and refined for FREE!
Compare this to a company like Paradox and Colossal Order who killed Cities Skylines 2. That game released in the sorriest state I think I’ve ever seen in my life(including SimCity 5). The graphics are ass. The simulation didn’t actually work. The traffic was worse than the original. Every system in that game was fucked beyond belief. On top of that they charged people on day 1 for additional content. Content that took almost 2 years to deliver. Now their original dev team got fired and a complete unknown with two games is supposed to take over the current king of a genre for a redemption arc. Cities Skylines 2 was murdered and set the modern city builder genre back almost 2 decades by continuing the reign of SimCity 4 as the best Modern City Buider ever.
When you compare that to what Hello Games has done with No Man’s Sky you will see why we celebrate them. This isn’t some exaggeration or accident. It’s years of steady, consistent work that has turned a broken and potentially career ending product into the recommended space sim of this generation.