Very cool post of the Steam news page.
From a technical perspective No Man's Sky hasn't had a smooth launch on PC. But in terms of sales, it's already one of the biggest launches ever of a game on Steam. Steam Stats, an official resource created by Valve, shows that 212,620 people were simultaneously playing No Man's Sky on launch day so far. In North America and Europe alone the Steam servers were serving a combined 4.7 terabits per second as people downloaded the game.
You might be thinking: Eh, that's far less than Dota 2, which is drawing just over 1 million concurrents in the middle of its biggest tournament of the year. And you're right. But consider this: 212,620 players is at least 46% more than what was achieved by every other 2016 release at launch, and it's possible that more people will boot up No Man s Sky on Saturday or Sunday, when Steam activity is typically at its weekly peak.
looking at that stat on launch day only proves one thing.
Marketing done right can make anything gold.
Looking at stats overtime on the other hand...
http://steamcharts.com/app/275850#All
From Aug 11 it went from 212,321 players to Aug 12, 162,223 players. That's a significant drop that only got worse as the days went on.
which is similar to other single player games like Hitman, Assasin's Creed, Deus Ex, Bioshock, Fallout 4, etc.
Games that tend to have sharp declines because they don't have anything that keeps the players in coming back after exhausting the content.
NMS was supposed to be this gigantic universe to explore and stuff to do. And if you look at charts for those types of games
(starbound, terria, etc) you see dips and rises that nearly come up to launch day. People haven't exhausted the content in that short of a time and keep coming back to play.
The closest thing I could find that similar to what NMS devs promised is Planet Explorers whose devs have the game in Beta. It's been worked on since 2014. Instead of putting a lot time in marketing the game to make as much money as quickly as possible, the devs here actually seems devoted into building an Exploratory type of game first.
NMS reminds me of Grav.
Ambitious project with lackluster results.