No Man's Sky Turns Ten, Teases Cosmos, and I Owe Sean Murray an Apology

I still have my launch copy of No Man's Sky on a shelf somewhere, the PS4 disc with the red diamond on the cover. I bought it the morning it came out, August 9, 2016. By that weekend I felt like a mark.

You probably remember why. The game that was supposed to contain eighteen quintillion planets shipped without the multiplayer Sean Murray had implied on talk shows, without most of the creature variety from the trailers, and without much to actually do once the novelty of the first three landings wore off. The internet turned it into a punchline. Hello Games went silent for months, which at the time read as an admission of guilt, and I traded my copy toward something else before the year was out. I was sure that studio was finished.

I was wrong. Completely, embarrassingly wrong, and the tenth anniversary that just passed is the receipt.

On Saturday, No Man's Sky turned ten. Hello Games marked it with an open letter from Murray and a two minute retrospective video that flips through every major update the game has received, all 40 of them, every single one free. Base building. Living ships. Settlements, mechs, pets, full crossplay, an entire expedition system. Murray says the game hit its highest player numbers since launch this year, which is a sentence that should not be possible for a ten year old game that launched the way this one did. And then, at about the 1:45 mark, the video slows down, new key art fades in, and letters resolve one at a time into the name of the next update: Cosmos.

What is Cosmos? Nobody outside Guildford knows. Murray's letter promises big things and says details are coming soon, and that is the entire official record. I am not going to pretend I can read tea leaves here. Past update names have been literal (Living Ship was about living ships) and also completely opaque until launch day, so speculating feels like a waste of both our time.

Why a flatscreen anniversary belongs on this site

Here is the part that matters for anyone reading a VR site. In August 2019 the Beyond update added full VR support to the entire game. Not a mode. Not a demo diorama on a separate menu. The whole game, every planet, every system, free, on PSVR and PC VR on the same day. I remember loading it up that first night on my original PSVR, walking down the ramp of my ship, and just standing there in the grass for a stupid amount of time while my scanner pinged. Seven years later that moment is still on my short list of the best things a headset has ever done for me.

The support was never flawless. This game eats hardware, and in PC VR I have absolutely dropped settings to lows I was not proud of to hold a framerate. The PSVR2 version launched blurry enough in February 2023 that players were vocal about it, and Hello Games responded the way they always respond now: they patched it, sharpened it with eye tracked foveated rendering, and eventually made it the first PSVR2 game to use PSSR upscaling on a PS5 Pro.

Compare that to how the other big flatscreen games have treated us. Bethesda sold us Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR and then walked away, leaving modders to finish the job. Elite Dangerous, a game practically born for headsets, shipped its on foot expansion with VR players staring at a flat screen floating in space. Against that backdrop, Hello Games kept full VR parity through seven years of free content updates without ever once charging for it or quietly letting it rot. That is nearly a lonely list. IO Interactive eventually got Hitman there too, but the club is tiny.

What I actually want from Cosmos

Only one thing, really. I want the pattern to hold. Whatever Cosmos turns out to be, I want to put on a headset the day it drops and have all of it, same as every update since Beyond. Given the track record I would bet on it, and it says something about this studio that the bet feels safe.

The bigger question mark is Light No Fire, the fantasy planet game Hello Games has been cooking alongside all of this. Murray's letter confirms the team is deep in it. Nothing has been said about VR support, and I want to be honest that hoping is not the same as knowing. But if any studio on earth has earned the benefit of the doubt from VR players, it is the one that spent a decade turning gaming's most famous broken promise into its most famous kept one.

Ten years ago I traded in this game and told a friend the studio would not survive the refund wave. Sean, if you ever read a mid sized VR news site run by a guy who was loudly wrong in 2016: I am sorry. Keep going.