No Man’s Sky is on sale for its lowest-ever PS4 price of $35 while the game’s PC reviews on Steam remain amongst the lowest-rated titles on the popular service. In other words, the rocky launch for Hello Games’ space simulator seems to be getting even rockier.
Visible on its Amazon store page, No Man’s Sky is currently being sold publicly for $40 with an additional $5 savings for Amazon Prime members. As far as we’re aware, this is the cheapest rate that a major retailer has purposefully sold the title for. It’s good news for those that want to see what the promised “limitless universe” is like without forking over a triple-A fee.
Other than a sweet deal of course, there are plenty of reasons why a No Man’s Sky price drop is interesting. While discounts happen fairly often for retail games these days, they don’t always occur to this degree just two months after the finished version is made available.
For reference's sake, we’re immediately reminded of commercial flops like Gearbox’s Battleborn that could be purchased for as low as $30 less than a month removed from its initial launch. No Man’s Sky’s price cut isn’t quite as big or as soon, but it may be the first real signs of rapidly waning public interest in something that was assumingly the most hyped game of this console generation.
If a single sale isn’t proof enough, maybe the game’s rapidly declining Steam reviews are. At the time of writing, nearly 50,000 of its total 73,000 reviews are classified as negative. Mathematically, that equates to about 70 percent of the total playing audience finding its experience less than satisfactory. Over the past 30 days, that trend has continued even further. With more than 5,000 samples to work from, only 11 percent of those had something good to say about the product. Clearly, most players have turned against Hello Games’ ambitious, exploratory vision.
These dropping prices and review scores are part of a much larger string of events destroying No Man’s Sky’s pristine preview cycle. A few weeks ago we reported that Hello Games is under investigation by agencies in the U.K. for false advertising. Shortly after release, it was discovered that the game didn’t feature many gameplay elements that developers said would be in the final build. Among those were passive multiplayer, large-scale factions and ship customization. It also didn’t help that both versions of the game suffered from major performance problems that impacted framerates and lead to crashing.
No Man’s Sky is available now on PS4 and PC.
What do you think of No Man’s Sky’s latest drama? Is this sale an indicator? Are Steam players being unfairly negative? Tell us in the comments section!
