No Man's Sky concurrent player numbers down by 90% on PC, less than two weeks from release

The number of Steam users playing No Man's Sky has cratered very sharply, very quickly.

The PC version of No Man's Sky has been a big hit. On release day, over 212,620 concurrent players helped make it biggest launch on Steam so far this year.

Now, less than two weeks since release, No Man's Sky numbers tell a much different story. The number of daily and hourly concurrent players have dropped significantly on PC.

According to data from SteamSpy as well as SteamDB, the decline in player numbers is around 90 percent. On August 12, the concurrent player number peaked at 212,604. At the time of writing, it's dropped to 19,336 - the highest number of concurrent players in the last 24 hours.

Interest has certainly fizzled out quite a bit, even when you look at hourly concurrent player data. This drop was expected, and the vast majority of games lose a good percentage of their players following their first days of release, but how quickly that number fell and how sharply the graphs go for No Man's Sky is definitely not very common.

Looking at other big releases this year, The Division peaked at 113,839 on March 12, and dropped to 73,185 two weeks later. XCOM 2, another big game this year saw a drop from 133,020 on February 7, to 48,2018 on February 21.

Dark Souls 3 and Total War: Warhammer tell similar stories. The former dropped from 129,266 on launch day, to 71,168 14 days after , while the latter saw players drop from 113,016 on launch, to 50,564 on June 7.

Although we don't currently have, and may never get, PlayStation 4 sales numbers, the UK charts recorded a massive slump after just one week on sale.

Although this may not say much about the quality of the game, it says quite a bit about fan reception. It's really sad to see excitement on launch day turn into anger over missing features, the game's ending, PC performance and other problems.