Five years ago, No Man's Sky from Hello Games was released and man was it ever a massive disappointment. It sat at an "Overwhelmingly Negative" score on Steam for quite a while around the game's launch.
However, in those five years Hello Games never gave up on the title. In fact, they just released their latest massive content update, Frontiers, that adds in the ability to run your own settlements. It's one of those great comeback stories you often read about, but the story isn't over just yet. Over these past five years, No Man's Sky has managed to crawl its way out of the gutter and has now hit the "Mostly Positive" review score threshold on Steam.
Being rated "Mostly Positive" in Steam user reviews means that at least 70% of all the people reviewing the game have given it a positive endorsement. Not only that, but the recent reviews for No Man's Sky are sitting at "Very Positive." In other words, 91% of all recent user reviews have been positive. Tim Woodley, the head of publishing at Hello Games, says that the move from Overwhelmingly Negative to Mostly Positive is "an incredible achievement for the team."
"Moving to 'Mixed', which may seem funny to celebrate, took two years of hard work. Moving from Mixed to Mostly Positive has taken the last three years (knowing that any small mistake along the way may result in backlash and negative reviews).
"In some ways, it's easy to dismiss Steam reviews, it's a bit of meme to share the silly ones, but as a developer, they are undeniably meaningful. For five years now if someone bought No Man's Sky they had to do it in spite of a red or yellow warning symbol beside our name (and affecting the likelihood algorithm in charge of displaying the name in the first place). The team is really chuffed today at hitting this milestone but we also owe a huge thank you to the community, the players, but also folks like yourself who continue to support us to do this work we enjoy.
"Each percentage point becomes exponentially harder to earn as you move up the ratings. Moving from 20% positive to 21% positive may only require a few hundred positive reviews whereas moving from 69% to 70% needed 10,000 positive reviews. This is why it's so rare for games to change their All-Time rating and why we'd assumed that we might never be able to."
"In some ways, it's easy to dismiss Steam reviews, it's a bit of meme to share the silly ones, but as a developer, they are undeniably meaningful. For five years now if someone bought No Man's Sky they had to do it in spite of a red or yellow warning symbol beside our name (and affecting the likelihood algorithm in charge of displaying the name in the first place). The team is really chuffed today at hitting this milestone but we also owe a huge thank you to the community, the players, but also folks like yourself who continue to support us to do this work we enjoy.
"Each percentage point becomes exponentially harder to earn as you move up the ratings. Moving from 20% positive to 21% positive may only require a few hundred positive reviews whereas moving from 69% to 70% needed 10,000 positive reviews. This is why it's so rare for games to change their All-Time rating and why we'd assumed that we might never be able to."
Sean Murray, the founder of Hello Games also voiced his thanks to the community via Twitter.
