No Man's Sky Turns Ten: Sean Murray Bites His Lip on Light No Fire
Sean Murray says he has to bite his lip every day to avoid showing off Light No Fire, the next game from Hello Games, because it is already past the point where most studios would be talking about it openly.
Speaking to Eurogamer to mark the tenth anniversary of No Man's Sky, the studio founder said the team is "working really hard" on Light No Fire alongside continued development of No Man's Sky, which still receives regular updates nearly a decade after launch. Another big update for No Man's Sky is on the way, Murray confirmed.
The anniversary puts Hello Games in an unusual position. No Man's Sky launched in August 2016 to a famously rocky reception — Murray had talked up features during promotion that were not in the game at release, and the studio spent years rebuilding trust through free updates that added base-building, multiplayer, underwater exploration, and far more. Murray now says he learned a "very important lesson" about not talking about things beforehand.
He sees a "very stark difference" between how No Man's Sky was promoted in its earliest days and how Light No Fire is being handled now. The contrast is deliberate: where the earlier game was shown extensively and discussed openly years before launch, its successor has been almost entirely kept under wraps since its reveal.
Light No Fire was formally unveiled at The Game Awards in December 2023 (Eurogamer). It is described as a co-operative adventure about "adventure, building, survival, and exploration" set on an ancient, procedurally generated fantasy planet — a world generated by algorithms rather than hand-designed, the same technical approach behind No Man's Sky's near-infinite galaxy, but here focused on a single planet the size of Earth. At the game's reveal, Murray called it "the first real open world" (TechRadar).
Murray told Eurogamer that what the team has on screen and plays every day is "so far beyond the point where we should have said something by now." He said Hello Games will at some point let people see more, and that it will be very exciting when they do — but no date was given for when that might happen.
For No Man's Sky players, the anniversary comes with reassurance that the game they have is not being abandoned for the new project. Murray told GamingBible in April 2026 that the team has "big plans" for No Man's Sky's future and that the game's direction was never fully anticipated even at release (GamingBible). Ten years in, that trajectory has not run its course.
What stands out is the discipline. A studio that once oversold a game now refuses to show one until it is ready — and by Murray's own account, ready is a threshold long since crossed. Whether that restraint holds or the lip-biting finally gives way is a question only Hello Games can answer, on its own schedule.
