No Man's Sky
Worth it · Shooter · 2016
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $59.99.
- Length
- 32.3h
- Value
- $1.86/hr
- Reviews
- 85% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB, AMD RX 470 4GB, Intel UHD graphics 630, 15 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
No Man's Sky is a game about exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated universe.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2017 is where it bottomed out, at $23.99. Its cuts run 50 percent off as a rule. There have been 99 in the 11 years tracked, about 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 2 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 13 percent on value. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 71 percent. Among the games that feel like it, ASTRONEER ($29.99, scores 74) beats it on value, while it beats Breathedge ($24.99, scores 53).
Critics scored it 61. Players sit 24 points higher at 85 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
21 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 42 percent of the 16,663 reviews written there were positive, against 85 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 32.3 hours; clearing it takes 158, which is 4.9 times the campaign.
10 years after release it still had 12.3K people in it at once.
Deck Verified, so no launch options and no controller remapping before it runs.
The drop-off
73% start to 1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
12.3K players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I've played this game off and on over the years, launch was undoubtedly bad, but they have gone on to make this game an absolute treat to return too every now and then. Highly recommend.
The devs are constantly adding new FREE updates, while developing a completely different game. The world is full of cool planets and spaceships and there so much you can do. This game also gets put on sale constantly.
My favorite game ever, been returning over time for almost 7 years now, longer than three computers. Keep upgrading just to play.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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No Man's Sky scores 71/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/275850/no-man-s-skyThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 5, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.