No Man’s Sky creator admits the studio was ‘running out of money’ during the game’s development

There's been a lot of silence surrounding No Man's Sky's so obviously troubled launch, but it seems now almost six months later, most of the fan noise has (finally) died down. It appears that has allowed the game's creator, Sean Murray to step forward and talk a little bit about what happened behind-the-scenes. It's worth hearing since fans have a way of painting a very colorful, if inaccurate depiction of the events (the game's Steam user reviews are top notch in that category). In speaking at GDC 2017 (per Ars Technica), Murray admits a lot of missteps on the part of the developers, and also reveals that his studio, Hello Games was actually "running out of money" while they were developing the game.

This isn't a total shock given how small Hello Games actually is, which Murray revealed averaged just nine employees over the past five years. He said that juggling the financial situation with "trying to finish something you care about really creatively" was a constant reality for the studio, and frankly that's something a lot of smaller developers live with on a daily basis.

That said, Hello Games could have done things better, and one of those Murray says, was their prediction on the number of concurrent players on launch day. As it turns out, they thought they were only going to get around 14,000, a number that they had gotten when using Far Cry: Primal as a reference point. As it turns out, they got around half a million, 250,000 of which were on PC.  The studio's "networking team" consisted of only one person, so as a result the crash data being sent was being handled slowly due to the lack of available people to take care of it.

In the end, No Man's Sky is a game that will be remembered by gamers for all of the wrong reasons, serving as a lesson against pre-ordering, boarding hype trains, and believing everything you see. It's unfortunate, as this will only make developer's jobs more difficult in the future, but being guilty by association is just something that people will never let go of. Hello Games in the mean time will continue to focus on procedural world development, and already has another project in the works.

Source: [Ars Technica]