No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with a few eye-catching stats and a tease for the upcoming update.

The hotly anticipated No Man’s Sky launched on August 9, 2016 on PS4 and PC to tens of thousands of negative reviews on Steam, with players complaining about broken promises and a lack of meaningful content, particularly on the multiplayer side. The game quickly settled on the dreaded ‘overwhelmingly negative’ Steam user review rating, a clear sign to anyone who visited its Steam page that something was very wrong.

But Guildford, England-based developer Hello Games continued to update No Man’s Sky over the years, improving player sentiment to the point where it is now considered superb. It took two years to hit ‘mixed,’ then another three to hit ‘mostly positive.’ At the time, five years after launch, Tim Woodley, Head of Publishing at Hello Games, explained how hard it was to claw back Steam user reviews from such a low base. No Man’s Sky now sits on ‘very positive’ on Steam user reviews.

Today, Hello Games development chief Sean Murray penned a note to fans expressing his delight that No Man’s Sky has stood the test of time, confirming that this year has seen the game's highest player numbers since launch. Murray even revealed an eye-catching stat: even now, a decade after launch, players have explored less than 1% of the planets in No Man’s Sky.

No Man’s Sky features a procedurally generated deterministic open world universe, which includes over 18 quintillion planets (18,446,744,073,709,551,616 to be exact). Ahead of No Man’s Sky’s release, Hello Games told IGN it would take 585 billion years to see them all. So yes, less than 1% sounds about right. That's a lot of video game planets that are up and running but will never be seen!

Murray also used the anniversary to tease No Man’s Sky’s next update, Cosmos, proving that support for the game will continue beyond the 10-year mark. Hello Games is also busy working on its next game, Light No Fire, which is about adventure, building, survival and exploration together, set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth. We haven't heard anything about it since it was revealed at The Game Awards 2023.

Sean Murray’s open letter to No Man’s Sky fans in full:

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.