Ten years ago today, on August 9, 2016, No Man’s Sky launched on PS4 to one of the most turbulent receptions in gaming history. A decade on, that same game has won TGA and BAFTA awards for Best Evolving Game, seen tens of millions of players spend hundreds of millions of hours exploring its universe, and just posted record player numbers since launch in 2026. To mark the occasion, Hello Games co-founder and managing director Sean Murray posted an open letter to the community, a two-minute anniversary retrospective video, and — most importantly for fans — a tease of the next major update: Cosmos.
Details on the update itself are essentially nonexistent right now, but the name is live, the tease is out, and Murray has confirmed that “more will follow.” Here’s everything we know about where No Man’s Sky is heading.
40 Free Major Updates in 10 Years — What That Actually Looks Like
Before getting into Cosmos, it’s worth taking a second to appreciate the scale of what Hello Games has delivered since 2016. With 40 major updates, all of them free, the team has expanded the sandbox universe with base building, settlements, mechs, pets, new ships, expeditions, and rebuilt the entire universe multiple times. That’s not just a patch cadence — that’s a complete reinvention of a product, repeated over and over across a decade.
The anniversary video that Murray posted covers the full update history in roughly two minutes, giving each of the 40 updates a brief moment — from early additions like base building and multiplayer through to more recent features. Long-time players will clock highlights like the exosuit gameplay overhaul, underwater mechanics, capital ships, the fully functional VR mode, and the Mass Effect Normandy SR1 crossover frigate that appeared in May 2021. In 2026 alone, Hello Games has added a gravity gun, Pokémon-style pet battling, and World of Warcraft-style raids, which gives a sense of how ambitious the recent update pace has been even at year ten.
At the 1 minute 45 second mark of the anniversary video, the retrospective wraps and a new piece of key art appears. The word COSMOS is revealed letter by letter — that’s the full extent of what we know about the content. Murray’s letter confirms “more will follow” on what the update contains, so the formal reveal is coming separately.
What Cosmos Could Actually Mean for the Game
With no official content details confirmed, everything here is informed speculation — but there are some reasonably strong signals worth reading.
The name itself is the most obvious clue. Cosmos is a direct reference to space on the grandest scale, which could point toward an overhaul or significant expansion of the game’s deep space and interstellar travel systems. The recent run of updates has skewed toward on-planet and social content — terrain vehicles, pet battling, faction warfare through The Swarm. A Cosmos update could represent a swing back toward the outer reaches of the galaxy: black holes, anomalies, deep space exploration, or something that significantly expands what exists between star systems.
Murray noted that players have only explored around 1% of the planets available in the game, given how vast the galaxy is. That’s not a throwaway stat — it’s a pointed reminder that No Man’s Sky is built on a universe so large that even a decade of active play has barely scratched the surface. Cosmos as an update name in that context feels like Hello Games is about to make the unexplored feel more worth exploring. Whether that comes through new space biomes, deep space mechanics, a new tier of interstellar content, or something else entirely is anyone’s guess right now.
The previous major update, Swarm, launched in May 2026. If Cosmos follows a similar spacing to recent updates, the window of late 2026 — potentially Q3 or Q4 — looks realistic. Murray’s “more will follow” phrasing suggests a full reveal is imminent rather than months away.
Sean Murray’s Open Letter: The Full Picture
Murray’s anniversary letter is worth reading in full for anyone who’s followed No Man’s Sky’s journey, but here are the key quotes and what they tell us.
On the milestone itself: “For any game to reach its tenth anniversary is impressive, and I think that’s especially true for No Man’s Sky. The fact that this year we’ve seen record player numbers since launch, and picked up TGA and BAFTA awards for Best Evolving Game, really speaks to the passion for the game from both our team and players.”
On the team staying the course: Murray noted that most of the developers at Hello Games who worked on the game at launch are still with the company — which is a genuinely unusual level of retention for a studio across a ten-year single-project run, and speaks to why the updates have maintained a consistent quality and creative vision over time.
On where No Man’s Sky goes next: “In a similar way our small team feels we have a lot left to explore in what No Man’s Sky can be. In the background we are 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!”
That phrasing — “big things for the future of No Man’s Sky” — is doing more work than just teasing one update. It reads like Hello Games is framing Cosmos as the start of a new phase rather than just the next item in a long update list. Whether that means a content partnership, a new long-term roadmap, or simply a particularly ambitious update is unclear, but the framing is notably more expansive than a typical patch announcement.
The Comeback Story That Gaming Still Hasn’t Fully Processed
No Man’s Sky’s turnaround has been discussed so many times that it’s become almost a cliché — but the actual numbers behind it are worth revisiting on a milestone like this. The original launch version of the game was so different from what was shown in pre-release marketing that Sony had to temporarily pull the game’s product listing from PlayStation’s website. The day-one refund wave was enormous. Reviews settled at a 71 on OpenCritic with only a 37% critic recommendation rate. It was, by any measure, one of the most damaging launches in modern gaming history.
What followed was a years-long reconstruction that never asked players to pay for a single piece of it. Every one of the 40 major updates — multiplayer, VR, base building, expeditions, mechs, pets, raids — arrived for free. The game was eventually released on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2, expanding its reach with each new platform rather than treating ports as a second-tier concern. The result is a game that now looks almost nothing like what shipped in August 2016, and a studio whose reputation went from one of the worst in recent memory to one of the most trusted in the indie space.
The closest comparable redemption arc in recent memory is Cyberpunk 2077, which went through a similar launch-to-recovery journey — but No Man’s Sky got there faster, did it entirely through free content, and did it with a team that was never more than around 25–30 people.
Light No Fire: Still Cooking, Still Coming After 2026
The other thing Murray addressed — briefly but meaningfully — is Light No Fire, Hello Games’ next original project. Light No Fire is a new game set on a single planet the size of Earth, featuring similar procedural generation and sandbox gameplay mechanics as No Man’s Sky. It is slated for release sometime after 2026 and is only confirmed for PC so far.
The concept is essentially the inverse of No Man’s Sky — instead of infinite planets with relatively shallow individual surfaces, one planet with essentially infinite depth. Murray’s anniversary letter frames Light No Fire as running parallel to ongoing No Man’s Sky development rather than replacing it, which tracks with how Hello Games operated during the mid-cycle of No Man’s Sky updates when multiple projects were quietly in development simultaneously.
The last major public reveal of Light No Fire was at The Game Awards 2023 — nearly three years ago at this point — so any update on its timeline or content through the anniversary messaging is a welcome signal that the project is still actively in development rather than quietly shelved.
For more on the biggest gaming news this week, check out our coverage of the SAO Echoes of Aincrad DLC confirmed for Winter 2026, the officially announced Warhammer 40,000 animated series with Henry Cavill producing, the wild story of how Steam approved a Battlefield 6 refund after 470 hours, and how Asobi Remote Play is enabling PS Plus cloud streaming on Steam Deck without a PS5.
