I believe a lot of people see No Man's Sky as the poster child for how updates can fix a game. If you ask me, though, it's a much greater argument for the fragility of the live service model. At launch, this was maligned. It was "Mostly negative" on Steam and stayed that way for years. Upheaval from content creators on YouTube and personalities in other online spaces got heated to the point where the developer's Twitter was briefly hacked. This was supposed to be THE game, and when it came out four years too early, it stung many people.

But that doesn't matter now because it's good, right? People love the game; people are playing the game, and all is forgiven! But the thing about that is that much larger companies see this as something else. It's not about dedication to your craft and the projects you work on; it's about how to turn your sullied reputation around by saying you'll do something. Release your games with the bare minimum amount of content, sprinkle updates around, and play cloy about how much you care about it all. When none of that is working because the game you've made simply isn't fit for that kind of model, fuck it, give up and move on to the next failed live service. It's not like you chose to release the game earlier or anything.

Love it or hate it, No Man's Sky represents a turning point in this industry that's hard to look away from. It's the sight of decaying infrastructure, the promise of ambition having been ballooned up to the scale where it's no longer feasible to finish the games you're releasing before they hit store shelves. And that doesn't even mention the human cost that's gone into it, my god.