No Man's Sky is ten years old. Hello Games marked the anniversary on August 9 with a trailer, a letter from Sean Murray, and one word that the community has been chewing on ever since: Cosmos. That is the name of the next major update, and right now it is all anyone outside the studio knows about it.
The anniversary post reads less like a marketing beat and more like someone genuinely surprised to still be here. "I feel surprisingly emotional today," Murray wrote, before running through the decade: forty major updates, all of them free, and a game that has been rebuilt several times over since the version that shipped on August 9, 2016.
Forty free updates, and a universe that is still 99% unseen
The list of what has been bolted onto No Man's Sky since launch is genuinely absurd when you see it in one place: base-building, exocraft, settlements, mechs, pets, living ships, expeditions. Platform support kept widening too - Switch, Xbox, VR, PSVR, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and, most recently, Switch 2. None of it was sold as an expansion pack.
The stat Murray keeps returning to is the one that best explains why the studio has not run out of road: after ten years and tens of millions of players, Travellers have collectively explored less than 1% of the planets in the game. Procedural generation always made that technically true, but it lands differently now that there is a decade of hand-built content layered on top of it.
2026 has been the game's best year since launch
This is not a nostalgia lap for a game running on fumes. Murray says No Man's Sky hit its highest player numbers since launch in 2026, and the game picked up both a Game Awards and a BAFTA for best evolving game along the way. The three updates it has shipped this year explain why: Remnant in February, Xeno Arena in April - which added Pokemon-style creature battling - and The Swarm in May, which dropped a station-sized hostile hive called the Hive of Glass into the sky and split the playerbase into three competing factions to deal with it.
On Steam the game now sits at a Very Positive rating, hovering around 83%. For a launch that became shorthand for overpromising, that turnaround is the whole story - and it took the full ten years to complete.
What Cosmos might actually be
Hello Games has said nothing concrete. The full text of the tease is that the team is "busy cooking on our next game Light No Fire, and big things for the future of No Man's Sky, with the tease of our upcoming update titled 'COSMOS'. More will follow!"
The name invites the obvious reading. No Man's Sky's biggest structural updates have historically been the ones that touched the universe layer itself - Worlds Part I and Part II rebuilt planetary generation, Waypoint reworked progression, and The Swarm went after space combat. A word like Cosmos points upward rather than down at the planet surface. That is a guess, not a report, and the studio has form for updates that land somewhere nobody predicted.
Worth noting: Murray used the same paragraph to confirm Light No Fire is still in active development. Hello Games' next game - a single planet the size of Earth, currently announced only for PC - has no date beyond "after 2026," and the studio has been careful not to repeat the pre-release hype cycle that defined 2016. Given how that turned out, and how the ten years since have gone, that restraint is probably the point.
No Man's Sky is available on PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PSVR2 and PC VR. The Cosmos update has no announced date.
