No Man's Sky on a Roll - Possible Thanks to Starfield
No Man's Sky is attracting a lot of players in September. Partly due to the big update, but apparently the release of Starfield also helped.
The success of Bethesda's new game (despite some problems) serves more than just its creators. Starfield apparently also helped No Man's Sky, which has grown in popularity recently.
A glance at the stats on Steam (via SteamDB) shows that on September 10, Hello Games' work was played by a record number of players over a two-year period. On that day, at its peak, more than 34,000 players launched the game simultaneously - the most since September 12, 2021.
The sudden surge of interest in NMS was by no means limited to PCs. Sean Murray, CEO of Hello Games, announced that No Man's Sky has just experienced its "biggest month in several years" on all platforms, i.e. PC, PS4, PS5, XOne, XSX/S and Switch, as well as VR devices (via Twitter).
One could argue that this surge in players is more likely the effect of the recently released Echoes - the latest major update for NMS. The problem is that version 4.4 has been available since August 24, and while the game was already gaining in popularity by then, the number of users began to drop by the end of the month. The current phase of growth began on September 6, coinciding with the release of Starfield (SteamDB). Not to mention that, as said before, this is the best month of the game "in years", despite the fact that NMS regularly receives major updates.
Nevertheless, the active development of No Man's Sky has also affected the game's current popularity. Other titles using similar themes have seen little (or no) growth in the number of players on Steam.
