The head of No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games, Sean Murray, has said it would be a bad idea for his mental health to think about how much money the studio could have made by charging for the game’s various expansions or by selling microtransactions.
“I’m sure somebody could take me aside, take me into a room and show me some PowerPoint and show me that we could have made more money if we had done in-app purchase or, you know, if we had done DLC or something like that,” Murray told GamesRadar. “‘And maybe that would be true. I never want to see that PowerPoint.”
Murray and the team decided against this, though, because the studio wanted players to have access to all of the post-release content together.
“What I know is that I really, really enjoy–and I think the team really gets a kick out of–working on an update and knowing that what I’m working on, everyone is going to experience this,” he explained. “Every player that we have is going to experience this. And I think we really enjoy the journey, and the journey is only possible because every update compounds.”
He went on to say that a feature like the Xeno Arena, a turn-based creature-battle mode, would not work “if you’re fragmenting your audience.”
“It’s a big part of our motivation, what gets us out of bed in the morning,” Murray said. “So it doesn’t matter if it’s not the most commercially efficient thing that we can do. I think what matters is that it makes us still excited about working on it 10 years out.”
No Man’s Sky recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and Murray separately said players have only discovered 1% of the game’s world, even now.
Hello Games is now working on a new game called Light No Fire, an ambitious-looking game with dragons; it has no release date yet.