No Man’s Sky Loses 88% of Steam Player Count

Right now No Man’s Sky currently holds the crown of being the biggest Steam release of 2016 so far, with a concurrent player count of 282,620 players on launch day, putting it far ahead of anything else that has released so far. Unfortunately, since then, perhaps due to the game’s numerous issues on PC, this player count has dropped by 88% already after only two weeks of release.

By making use of sites such as SteamSpy and SteamDB, we can see that No Man’s Sky’s peak concurrent player count was on August 11th at a whopping 282,620, but by August 22nd it was down to 25,689. Hourly concurrent players have also dropped from 127,224 on August 14th to 22,852 on August 23rd. Of course, this is only the concurrent player count, which illustrates how many people are playing the game simultaneously and as the lustre wears off, many players will stop putting in the long stints on the game that they did on release.

This drop has led to many online claiming the game is already dead on PC, but for a AAA title, a large drop-off in players is, in fact, not unusual. Within a month of release Far Cry Primal had dropped 82% of its concurrent players, Fallout 4 fell 74%, Doom by 85% and Battleborn slid 82% and even the highly praised Witcher 3 lost 71% of its peak player count. In fact, while not a AAA title, the only notable example of a game that breaks this trend is Stardew Valley which only saw a 30% fall in players over the first month.

So while No Man’s Sky’s falloff has been slightly higher than other popular games, such a downward trend is far from unusual. It may be a little disappointing to see when Hello Games themselves claimed that the 18-quintillion planets available in the game would offer endless hours of open-ended exploration. The biggest struggle for No Man’s Sky would seem to be the fact that compared to trailers released prior to the game’s launch, there just isn’t that many interesting things to explore and discover and after only a few planets, there’s a disturbingly high chance of seeing the same features and events repeated. Perhaps the hype surrounding No Man’s Sky’s launch was the strongest contributor to its downfall, but I doubt this is the last we’ll hear from No Man’s Sky.