Two Years Later: No Man’s Sky Dev Talks Regrets and Death Threats

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Hello Games founder Sean Murray got real about many of the horrors the development team experienced following the release of No Man’s Sky in 2016.

It’s no secret that No Man’s Sky released to heavy criticism and an outrage that soon became dangerous. Even for those who weren’t fully in the loop, it wasn’t difficult to come across YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and Tweets bashing Hello Games and Sean Murray for the content found in No Man’s Sky– many going so far as to proclaim the studio head a liar. And on the most extreme and horrific end of the spectrum, sending the No Man’s Sky team death threats.

“It was as bad as things can get, basically,” Murray tells The Guardian. “There’s a smorgasbord of things that the angry mob can do. It’s a crowdsourced thing of how bad you can make someone’s life.” It was so bad, in fact, Hello Games needed to be in frequent contact with Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police, due to bomb threats at the studio. Murray then goes on to reveal he received death threats because there were butterflies in the original No Man’s Sky trailers, but none in the actual game.

As far as regrets, Sean Murray explains:

We definitely messed up a whole bunch of communication. I’ve never liked talking to the press. I didn’t enjoy when I had to do it, and when I did it, I was naive and overly excited about my game. There are a lot of things around launch that I regret, or that I would do differently.

Despite the mild regret, Murray stands strongly by Hello Games’s original vision for No Man’s Sky, saying the game was “what we wanted it to be when it launched.

Hello Games could have easily fallen off the map after this terrifying stretch of harassment. And while the studio did grow quiet for a while, it was to develop No Man’s Sky even further and bring out the elements of the game that made it unique in the first place.

Let’s be clear: No Man’s Sky isn’t a bad game. It’s an indie game that suffered under the weight of massive expectations that were not properly managed. Now that the game has passed its two-year anniversary, Hello Games seems to be looking toward No Man’s Sky longevity with the release of its massive Next update, which will be available for free on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on July 24th.