No Man's Sky Could Have Charged for DLC — Sean Murray Doesn't Want to Know
Sean Murray, head of Hello Games, says it would be bad for his mental health to think about how much money No Man's Sky could have made by charging for its expansions or selling microtransactions. Someone could show him a PowerPoint demonstrating the studio left revenue on the table with in-app purchases or paid DLC. He never wants to see that PowerPoint, he told GamesRadar in an interview published 10 August 2026.
The decision against charging for post-release content was deliberate. Hello Games wanted every player to have access to all updates together, so the audience stays unified rather than split into those who bought an expansion and those who did not. Murray said the free-update model works because fragmenting the audience would prevent the team from committing to building on features across multiple updates — when the studio adds something like Xeno Arena, a turn-based creature-battle mode, it already considers how that feature will look two or three updates later.
That model has now produced more than 40 major free updates over a decade. The game's Steam store page lists them all, from Foundation — the first major post-launch update — through NEXT, Beyond, Origins, Worlds Part I and II, and on to the most recent additions like Xeno Arena and The Swarm. PlayStation's official account marked the game's 10th anniversary on 10 August 2026, noting the same figure of over 40 free updates across ten years.
The scale of the game itself remains staggering even to its creator. Murray said players have discovered only 1% of No Man's Sky's world after a decade and 40 major updates, according to GameSpot. Hello Games describes the title on its official website as an "ever expanding science fiction epic," and the numbers back the description: a procedurally generated universe so vast that millions of players have barely scratched its surface.
The team behind it has always been small. During early development, the team averaged about six people, growing to roughly 15 by launch in 2016. Murray said 12 to 20 people work on No Man's Sky at any given moment now, alongside other studio projects — the most prominent being Light No Fire, a world-scale survival game about adventure, building and exploration that features dragons. It has no release date yet.
Players have repeatedly asked Murray in his social media replies to charge them for the free updates. He has declined, saying commercial efficiency is not what matters to the studio.
What stands out here is the stubbornness of it. In an industry where post-launch content is routinely monetised — through season passes, cosmetic stores and battle passes — Hello Games has given away a decade of additions to a game that launched in August 2016. Murray framed the choice not as sacrifice but as strategy: a unified player base lets the team keep building, update after update, on a foundation no one is locked out of.
Eurogamer published its own interview with Murray on 10 August 2026, reflecting on ten years of No Man's Sky and what the publication called the studio's "redemption arc" — a reference to the game's difficult 2016 launch and the years of free updates that followed. Murray has spoken about that period before, but the focus now is forward: more updates, still free, for a game whose universe remains 99% unexplored.
