10 years of No Man's Sky: How Hello Games and Sean Murray keep getting away with it

No Man's Sky is director Sean Murray's "garden." It's the kind of intricate, blossoming arbor you can only get from years of planting and pruning, little but consistent efforts suddenly appearing massive when you step back and take it all in. Getting it shipped and steady was extremely difficult and stressful, Murray tells me, but now he and Hello Games can tend it as they like. Every few months, players will wonder what else the devs could possibly add to No Man's Sky, and then Murray will say, in so many cryptic emojis on Twitter, hold my beer.

"There's now this sort of zen feeling, actually, to working on No Man's Sky – for me anyway" Murray explains. "It is very comfortable and very rewarding to work on. It is that feeling of going out into the garden and working on something that you get a lot of enjoyment from. I think I've learned to really love that."

"That wasn't how I would have thought about it 10 years ago," he adds. That's partly because, 10 years ago, Hello Games was too busy responding to feedback after a launch that underwhelmed many players, while also creating more stuff for No Man's Sky's huge, still mostly unexplored universe. With time, experience, and an irresponsible number of updates, Murray and the team are much more relaxed.

To launch and back

Cyberpunk 2077 was practically unplayable on day one but has since become a generational RPG, yet it's not the greatest comeback in gaming history. To this day, No Man's Sky is what all turnarounds are measured and compared against. Murray still plays and likes the launch version of the game, but many remember it as a gorgeous but empty survival experience hungry for purpose and intent – a garden with incredible crimson grass, but little else.

Nobody could say that about the No Man's Sky of today. Hello Games has added so much – space bases, underwater terrors, planetary biomes, share and social functions, ship fleets, full-throated multiplayer, tech trees, terraforming, story missions, mech suits, crossplay, animal companions, and probably three times more than all of that – that you won't find a barren patch anywhere no matter how hard you look.

"If, 10 years ago, you had said to me, 'Sean, that's what you'll be working on 10 years from now,' I would have been like, 'Oh, I presume I won't enjoy that," Murray says of the game's many patches. "The picture I had in my head of continually updating a game would have been putting out skin packs every month or something like that, or adding a new spaceship every six weeks. But that did not appeal to me and didn't seem exciting. But this, where we're putting out quite big, exciting updates – at least to us – and lots of people play, I find that really rewarding. How could you not like that?"

Murray says Hello Games "used to have a little running joke" about No Man's Sky escaping the gravity of its launch. In anything written about the game, he says, "the first line would always say, 'The disastrous launch of No Man's Sky.' That would be their opener, and then [they'd] talk about the update."

About three years in, this changed. "We had one article and it never mentioned the launch," Murray recalls. "It just talked about the update. Honestly, I felt like a weight had lifted. Until that point, it felt like we were really trying to update the game and maybe no one really wanted it. It was like we were fighting this real uphill battle, but over time, it's become much clearer to everyone that there's this community who really loves the game."

I ask Murray what advice he'd send to the decidedly less zen man he was 10 years ago. To start, he says he'd like to go back even further, a full 12 years. "I would tell that guy, don't do all the press and stuff that you're doing," he says. "I would tell that guy, guess what? You never wanted to do press and be a frontman. You don't enjoy it, you won't enjoy it, and you also won't be very good at it. Just avoid that whole thing and stick to just making games and coding."

The Sean Murray of 10 years ago would get a more heartwarming message. "My god, launch was a really hard time," Murray adds. "That was really hard mentally. Just picture all the worst things that can happen if you're not popular on the internet. I would love to go back to that person and just give them a little glimpse of what No Man's Sky is now. I would not have believed that was possible. I would have found it so incredibly motivational. I would love to have had that vision, to know that this is where it ends up. But I definitely wouldn't have believed it."

To infinity

Murray says Hello Games has been "really lucky with No Man's Sky," but the game has become what it is today because of the studio: a small, smart team of passionate and capable people. Just 12 to 20 devs are working on No Man's Sky at any given moment, and about as many are working on Light No Fire, another deeply ambitious survival game. Across 10 years, Murray says his favorite moments aren't watching record player counts, but rather seeing the Hello Games team solving problems really quickly" and "meshing together."

Vanishingly few games get 10 years of completely free updates. Murray doesn't want to know how much money he could've made by charging for new content, and he doesn't care. No Man's Sky updates remain free, he says, because he and the team want everyone to experience everything the game has to offer. And even after 10 years, Murray believes he could do this "forever."

"Honestly, if people weren't playing No Man's Sky, I don't think we would want to do updates," he reasons. "I don't think the motivation would be there. Obviously, if no one's playing your game, it's sort of pointless, right? But right in the early days, I remember trying to motivate the team to work on the game after launch. We talked about, just pick one person in your mind who you know is enjoying this game, this would be their perfect game if some things were improved or fixed, and then keep that person in your mind and work on it for them. It's going to be better for them. So I think the team does have that attitude, but you need some people to be playing the game, and we've been very lucky in that lots of people play the game."

Still, No Man's Sky may not be updated forever. "There probably is some end date," Murray says. "But if you had asked me five years ago, I would have thought we would have passed it by now." And when active development on No Man's Sky does eventually conclude, Murray probably won't be able to stop himself from occasionally putting something out into the stars.

"I saw MachineGames put out an update for Quake – some new levels," he begins. "And I was a big fan of Quake when it came out. It was one of my real inspirations for getting into making games. And I see that it's a 30-year-old game, and they release some new levels, and I think there are people who would look at that and say, 'What's the point? Why have they done that?'

"For me personally, I think that's so cool and joyous. I'm excited to go back and have that nostalgia and play. And I was talking to someone on the team who is like, 'Who's even making that? Who cares? Who's still there?' Almost the implication of: wouldn't it be sad if it was somebody who had worked on Quake for 30 years? And I just think it's cool. I can see a real joy in making some new levels for Quake."

Now, Murray has his own icon to watch as caretaker. He's a third of the way to 30 years already. His crystal ball can't see 20 years into the future, but Murray wants No Man's Sky, and all games, to last, and I get the impression he'd do just about anything to ensure it does.

"I could imagine us stopping doing updates for No Man's Sky at some point, and then 10 years later, I'm like, 'Let's do an update for No Man's Sky'. I think stuff like that is great. We are in a mindset right now, in the industry, of games just being very consumable. Onto the next one. But I personally really love going back to some of my favorite games and just replaying them when they come to a new platform or something. There's a real beauty in keeping those things alive."

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