No Man's Sky Gets a Surge of New Players with Next

No Man’s Sky has had a long journey to get to this point. Not to reiterate that journey from crappy game to kinda great game every time the subject comes up, but the latest expansion, Next, which launched for the game last weekend, was a really big deal. It finally delivered on some of the long-absent promises made when the game first game out, adding a real multiplayer, a third-person mode, unlimited base building, improved graphics, and more. Bringing new life into the old game… and more importantly (as far as Hello Games is concerned), bringing some new players to the old world.

Specifically, over on Reddit, people pointed out that over the weekend where Next was launched, the game had, at peak, a concurrent player count of around 97,000 people on Sunday. And while that’s a far ways removed from the 212,000 concurrent players that were getting uniformly disappointed when the game first came out, it’s still a record high compared to how many people used to be playing… and it’s even 5,000 more players than the Witcher 3 has ever enjoyed, which peaked at around 92,000 at the height of its popularity.

This surge is probably caused by both new and old players. With the release of Next, No Man’s Sky was briefly half-off, which was enough to rocket the game to the top of Steam’s global top sellers list. Which was no doubt helped by the fact that the recent reviews for the game have been overwhelmingly positive, at least, when compared to a long history of negative, angry reviews.

It’s all pretty impressive stuff, the kind of revival you don’t often see for two-year-old games, but you can’t deny that Hello Games put in the work. Maybe if they had put that work in from the beginning NMS would be the most played game in the world by now, but hey, can’t change the past. Only bitterly reflect on it.