One of the most anticipated games of 2016, No Man’s Sky, a year after its release, justified its name — the title was literally depopulated, having lost 99% of the audience.
According to the rating service GitHyp, a hybrid of a space simulator and an action game from Hello Games studio turned out to be “a small indie game with galactic scale PR.”
The game promised to be a revolution in game design, and on the day of its release on Steam, No Man’s Sky simultaneously gathered more than 212 thousand people.
But gamers quickly became disillusioned with what they saw: two weeks after the release, 78% of players abandoned the game, and over the next month and a half, 94% of the original audience stopped playing No Man’s Sky.
During the year, Hello Games released add-ons with new content several times, and this caused short-term peaks in game attendance, increasing it to 7-8 thousand players per hour. But each time the interest of the audience disappeared as quickly as it appeared.
Attendance of No Man’s Sky for all time by the number of players per hour, GitHyp
The latest attempt to attract gamers was to reduce the cost of the game by 50% to $24 during the Steam summer sale. The discount had almost no effect on the online No Man’s Sky, which continues to hold at the level of 500-1000 people.
This week Hello Games will release a big game update called Atlas Rises, in which they promise to refine the storyline and add fast movement between locations using portals.
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