Despite Rough Debut, No Man's Sky Had a Huge Steam Launch

No Man's Sky came to PC three days later than PS4 and then experienced a variety of technical issues, and yet it's still proven to be one of the biggest launches ever for a game on Steam in terms of concurrent players.

On Friday, its launch day, No Man's Sky saw a peak of just over 212,000 people playing at the same time, according to SteamDB. That puts it well ahead of some of this year's other big launches, such as XCOM 2 (133k), Dark Souls III (130k), and The Division (114k). SteamDB's charts show very few games with a higher all-time peak; only Dota 2 (1.3 million), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (855k), Fallout 4 (473k), and Grand Theft Auto V (365k) top it.

This doesn't necessarily mean No Man's Sky outsold any of the games it topped; it merely indicates that more people were playing it at the same time than the others at any point. Still, that's a sign of a positive launch for the game, though it remains to be seen where sales go from here.

While the PS4 version experienced a fairly smooth launch (some frame rate issues aside), PC players have encountered a wide variety of issues. These include poor performance, problems when alt-tabbing out of the game, and crashes. Fixes or workarounds have been offered for some of this, but the PC version is still far from perfect. This has contributed to No Man's Sky earning an average user review score of "mixed" on Steam, which is actually an improvement over the "mostly negative" it was sitting at previously.

For more on No Man's Sky, check out GameSpot's review and review roundup.