Love it or hate it, No Man’s Sky was the buzz around the video game water cooler last year. And while the space exploration title received major backlash following its shaky launch, creater Sean Murray said that last November’s Foundations update propelled the game to a million players (in some way, shape, or form).
In an interview from GDC, Murray performed a post-mortem on the game’s launch, saying that the team only expected about 14,000 players on day one — and became quickly overwhelmed when a half million explorers showed up to party. He noted that the relatively small team (nine employees) and the fact that the game started to run out of money during development were factors in the difficult release.
Meanwhile, Murray is focused on developing even more procedural generation for all of its projects: “Making really neat, weird engine decisions, and letting them dictate a cascade of problems: It’s cool for me to be able to stand up and say to talented people like yourselves, we’re looking for that kind of thing.”
