No Man's Sky Turns 10: Murray's 'Forever' Is a Portable Promise
No Man’s Sky launched in 2016 as a game built for the biggest TV you owned, a lonely universe that rewarded sitting still and staring at horizons. Ten years later, it’s arguably most at home on a screen smaller than the game’s original box art — and Sean Murray’s anniversary pledge that he’d work on it ‘forever’ if people keep playing is, for handheld owners, the most optimistic thing he’s said all year.
The GamesRadar interview finds Hello Games post-Voyagers, with the studio’s highest player numbers since launch and Murray describing a team that reacted to shipping by listing more ideas instead of asking for a rest. That energy matters on portable platforms specifically. A live game that keeps expanding is only as good as the handhelds that can still run it — and the fact that No Man’s Sky has ridden through the Switch generation and the rise of the Steam Deck is the real anniversary story.
The Switch Port Rewired the Universe for Short Sessions
The 2022 Switch version felt like a magic trick: a procedurally generated galaxy inside a Tegra X1. The port demanded compromises, but it revealed something structural — No Man’s Sky’s best loop, the quick scan-and-mine-and-dip rhythm, is made for 20-minute sessions between stops. That’s the same reason it became a Steam Deck mainstay. NMS is Verified on Valve’s hardware, and the eventual cross-save support now lets your expedition progress hop between Switch and PC saves without a second thought.
The toll is appetite. A decade of patches means an install that keeps eating into small SSD budgets — the flip side of the lean 2016 build that’s a handheld time capsule — and on a base-model Deck with its cramped eMMC, the storage math gets uncomfortable fast — Steam Deck microSD cards are the cheapest upgrade on the board. And when you launch it, the battery meter gets honest: dense, draw-distance-heavy worlds drain charge aggressively, so portable sessions trade some fidelity for the freedom to explore anywhere. That’s a fair trade for a universe that now fits in a carry-on.
Flat Management, Finite Hands: The Light No Fire Squeeze
Murray’s most revealing admission isn’t the ‘forever’ quote — it’s the structure behind it. Hello Games runs flat; there’s no management layer assigning features, so updates ‘have to come from the people working on it.’ That explains a decade of weird, generous updates that shipped because a developer was genuinely excited, and it also means no corporate calendar is driving No Man’s Sky’s future. For handheld players, that’s a reason to trust the game, not a reason to expect schedules.
But hands are finite. Light No Fire is pulling a core team of roughly 12–20 developers, per Hello Games’ own lead, while the main studio keeps the NMS machine running. The practical reading: update cadence will eventually loosen, and the biggest expansions may land further apart — the game will eventually end, but its handheld future stays bright. What matters is Murray’s explicit link between support and player numbers — and portable players are a measurable share of that post-Voyagers spike. Every expedition finished on a plane, every cross-save resumed on a lunch break, is a vote for one more orbit. Don’t wait for No Man’s Sky 2; keep the current universe installed on whatever screen you’d rather carry.