Since its reveal at E3 2014, No Man’s Sky has turned millions of heads. Hello Games, the relatively small indie game studio, made sure the hype around their space exploration game grows leaps and bounds by bringing out all the unique stuff that the game has to offer. The hype along with the developers’ hard work has paid off; despite having a pretty rough launch-day, No Man’s Sky has come out on top as one of the biggest game launches Steam has ever seen in terms of concurrent players.

Despite Day-One Performance Issues, No Man's Sky Had One of the Biggest Steam Launches Ever

　　According to SteamDB, a resource that compiles data from Vavle’s official Steam Stats, 212,620 people were simultaneously playing No Man’s Sky on Friday, its launch day. That means, at least 46% more players were playing the game at same time compared to any other game launched on Steam this year so far. For comparison; XCOM 2 saw about 133,000 peak concurrent players, Dark Souls III saw around 130,000, and The Division saw 114,000. Of course, games like Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Fallout 4 and GTA V top the list, but none of those games was released this year.

　　Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean No Man’s Sky sold more copies than any of the games it topped. These are not sales figures, they actually show how popular a game is among the community. How well the game is doing in sales department is yet to be seen. But needless to say, popular games top the sales charts by selling in millions. Hello Games’ boss Sean Murray tweeted that an “insane” amount of people were playing the game within 15 minutes its launch.

　　No Man’s Sky is currently available on PC and PlayStation 4. Hello Games is currently working to fix various issues that are currently affecting the game’s performance on PC. A patch to reduce lag on PS4 is also in the works.