Cyberpunk 2077 is often held up as the greatest redemption arc in videogame history, but I think No Man's Sky has a legitimate claim on the crown too. More than eight years after it landed with an ugly thud on Steam—a "supernova of negative backlash and disappointment," as we put it at the time—Hello Games' sci-fi exploration epic has clawed its way up to a "very positive" rating on Steam.
The rating means that at least 80% of all user reviews of No Man's Sky are positive, and that's a far cry from the game's early days. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, this is what it looked like in August 2017, one year after No Man's Sky came out—positive reviews are coming in, but the overall rating is stuck in "mostly negative" thanks to the great, weighty mass of early negative reviews.
That's a massive mountain to climb, but Hello Games stuck with it, releasing bug fixes and major updates alike that slowly but surely made the game into what players had expected from it since the very beginning. It took five years and 17 free, "game-changing" updates to hoist the game into a "mostly positive" overall rating, and earlier in 2024 the next step on the ladder came within view: Hello Games head Sean Murray said in April, "I never thought it possible, but guys we might hit 'Very Positive' (80%) one day," although he also cautioned that "mathematically each % point is much harder to gain than the last."
And yet, here we are. "Holy shit you guys—it happened," Murray wrote on X. "ALL REVIEWS: Very positive. Thank you thank you thank you. You have no idea what this means to us."
It is, as we said earlier this year, "a great symbolic win" for Hello Games, but not really a game-changer in any practical sense. No Man's Sky is already a big sales success and widely regarded as an outstanding game: It's among the very few games to hold spots on our "worst launches" and "best games" lists at the same time. That Steam rating isn't going to have any real impact on the game's future fortunes, but symbols matter, and this is a big one.
The next step up in Steam's rating system, "Overwhelmingly Positive," requires at least 95% positive reviews, and that's likely going to be out of reach: By my extremely rough calculations, another 100,000 positive reviews—and no negatives—would nudge the rating up by five points, which would still leave it well shy of the mark. As Murray said, the math is tough. But even if that final number isn't attainable, this new milestone is a hell of an achievement by any measure.
Hello Games also kicked off Expeditions Redux today, a chance to replay (or play, if you missed them) the year's community expeditions "in a 'reduxed' form such that they can be completed and rewards unlocked with relative ease." The first, Omega, is live now and runs until December 11. And if you don't already have No Man's Sky in your library, it's on sale now for $24/£20/€24—60% off the regular price—in the 2024 Steam Autumn Sale.
