The popularity of No Man’s Sky has plummeted since the heady days of its August release, with Steam records showing that the number of concurrent players – how many people are playing the game at once – has dropped from 212,000 during the first few weeks to under 1,000 over the last few days.
In little over two weeks, the concurrent players fell from over 200,000 to under 25,000. The preceding few weeks saw that figure fall even more, gradually plateauing around the 1,000-to-3,000 mark for most of September.
While the game has been a commercial success, its critical reception has been mixed. Players and critics were left disappointed by the number of missing features that had previously been either promised or hinted, earning Hello Games’ lead developer Sean Murray the moniker of ‘The New Peter Molyneux’; one particularly harsh trending Google search is “Sean Murray liar.” One of the major missing features, though, was revealed to be absent a matter of days before the game’s release.
“It’s not really a multiplayer game, that’s not really the way to think about it,” Murray told Games.ch (video interview, below). “There are infinitesimal chances, very, very small chances of you even coming across a place that another player has been to […] The most likely thing that is going to happen is you are going to come across a planet and some other players have been there and they’ve named that planet and the creatures, and I’m sure they’ve given it a good name.”
Just give us our refund already