No Man’s Sky Concurrent Players Increase Nearly Six Times On Steam

No Man’s Sky was by no means an easy undertaking for Hello Games. The game promised a universe and mechanics the likes of which had never been seen before, consisting of eighteen quintillion planets (18000000000000000000 for us regular folk), interplanetary travel, each planet having unique flora and fauna thanks to procedural generation, survival mechanics, trading, and so much more. Considering all that it promised, it isn’t surprising that it had quite a lot of hype surrounding it, and a keen eye from the gaming community. Sony itself provided the funding for promotion and initial publication, and its E3 showing helped Hello Games a lot with getting the game out there in the public eye.

However, it seemed that the developer had promised too much to be able to produce a good product. Following its launch, No Man’s Sky received bad reviews from all around. Many criticised the game for the number of bugs it had and various performance issues, many also aimed towards the game’s direction and pacing, the repetitiveness, and lacklustre survival elements, among others. This did not stop Hello Games from working tirelessly on the game to address the present issues and fix them to make No Man’s Sky something somebody would want to play. Over the past 6 years, the developer has delivered quite a lot of updates and polished the game, which has raised its standing in the gaming community. The most recent update, named Outlaws, has the community buzzing.

Outlaws is by no means a small update for No Man’s Sky. Just as the name suggests, it brings about a host of changes an outlaw would need, such as improved space combat, outlaw stations, forming your own outlaw squadrons, interstellar piracy, and so much more other than the typical bug fixes and core game improvements. This update has brought back a lot of players, who may have been waiting for the update for quite some time. After all, who wouldn’t want to be a gun-toting space rebel and try to be as close to Han Solo as possible? The renewed interest in the game shows as well, according to the numbers on Steam Charts.

As can be seen in the charts, No Man’s Sky has almost 30,000 concurrent players on Steam as of the time of writing, with the 24-hour peak being 30,240, meaning that it had slightly over 30,000 concurrent players at a certain time in the previous twenty-four hours. This is also the most amount of concurrent players No Man’s Sky has had in the last 6 months on Steam, or, since the Frontiers update, which drew in quite a lot of players.

In the days preceding the recent update, the number of concurrent players ranged between four to eight thousand, mostly being much closer to the former and peaking on odd occasions. The Outlaws update launched on April 13, which implies that just three days following the update, the 24-hour peak average from March 2022 has been raised by 10.18%, with the peak player count going from eleven thousand in the last month to thirty thousand now. The story doesn’t end here. Following the hotly anticipated update, No Man’s Sky is now fourth in Steam’s Top Sellers list, third if you account for duplicate entry of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga possibly due to a different edition of the game.

This is proof enough that the recent Outlaws update has brought back attention to No Man’s Sky on a significant scale. With the update having been released just three days ago, these numbers are sure to rise and may even go way above the current thirty thousand mark. Seeing the above list, it can also be noted that Elden Ring is back on the top in the Top Sellers list on Steam, having been dethroned by LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga a few days ago. For now, it seems that there is no stopping this beast of a game.