When No Man’s Sky first released it left a lot of people feeling disappointed, to put it mildly. After being hyped for years as a revolution in open-world gaming, players found it to be little more than an ill-conceived sci-fi roguelike. While the game was certainly vast, sporting one of the largest game worlds we have seen to date, it gave the player few goals to chase other than the never-ending cycle of resource churn. Once the player had crafted enough jet-fuel, they could blast off to other planets where they… acquired more resources for jet fuel.

To say it was a shaky launch would be an understatement, but the team at Hello Games are ready to make good on their original promises. The developers recently dropped the Foundation Update, a massive patch that overhauls key mechanics and goals of No Man’s Sky. From a sheer content standpoint, the Foundation Update is a huge upgrade in quality, making the game far more fun and adding a lot more to do. But some fans and critics are saying that it’s too little and far too late, coming at the end of the year when the game originally launched in August.

Is everything lost for No Man’s Sky? Is the game dead because it had a bad launch, or is there hope for it yet? To speculate on this, we first have to look at how games are marketed.

Games as Events

If you examine the life-cycle of a typical video game, you’ll find something peculiar. Video games are branded more as events than products. They aren’t selling themselves on reliability, as something meant to keep you playing years down the line. They are all meant to be the biggest, flashiest, new experience – designed to make you run out, buy on day one, play until you are exhausted, and eventually replace with the next biggest, flashiest, new experience. This branding scheme isn’t anything new. It’s been around since Nintendo advertised Super Mario Bros 3 with The Wizard, a major motion picture that was practically a two hour commercial.

In fact, the same event-centric marketing scheme has been around since before video games even existed. It’s the exact pattern that motion pictures follow. They first release in theaters, where you’ll find yourself paying 10-20 dollars per viewing. Then, after a time, they have a home release, which allows you to spend less for infinite viewings. Enough time passes and good movies get released in anthologies for a mere fraction of their previous price, while bad movies get stuck in dollar bargain bins. Soon, the movies have practically no worth whatsoever, and you can catch them any lazy Sunday on TV. It’s a slow timeline of reducing value.

Games exhibit this same timeline of reducing value – starting with a flashy full price release, followed by numerous price discounts, Steam sales, and eventually you find them offered for mere pennies as part of a Humble Bundle. Their greatest value is when they are the newest, and the numbers show it. Nearly every game makes the majority of its money a mere weeks after its launch, with the rest of its lifetime on the market paling in comparison.

For games that follow this pattern, a shaky launch is deadly. Little can restore hype to a game after its original marketing push has faded. Few companies have the resources to devote to raising awareness after a game’s launch. In general 99% (not an actual statistic) of games with shaky launches fade into obscurity soon after.

But some games don’t and, surprisingly, they are some of the most popular games we have seen on the market. What made these games different? Well, let’s take a look at what some of them have in common.

Slow Burners

Diablo III is perhaps the best example that comes to mind when we think of bad launches. A pile of irritating DRM coupled with servers that were nowhere near ready to handle the game’s estimated load made the early days of Diablo III amount to little more than staring at an Error 37 screen. Even if you could play, the game was relatively shallow. There was little in the way of post-game content and the real money auction house ended up an economic and social catastrophe.

Since its launch, however, Diablo III has become an increasingly popular action RPG that is played heavily to this day. Blizzard added new classes, new dungeons, infinite dungeons for post-game content, a better loot system, and more. Every year at Blizzcon more and more content for this game is announced and players continue to trickle in. On top of this, Blizzard allowed players to install and play the first few acts of the game for free, making anyone with a Battle.net account and a healthy amount of curiosity likely to at least try the game out. The resulting influx of players has made the game produce a steady profit, even when compared to Blizzard’s big money makers like World of Warcraft.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, it too had a rocky launch. While much anticipated, it hit at a time when there were plenty of other MMOs competing for attention. It shared many of Diablo III’s problems, including server issues and repeated disconnects. It lagged at every town, its quests wouldn’t complete correctly, and a few wrong decisions could burden players with completely inviable character builds. But as time went on, Blizzard would fix these issues and offer perks and rewards to players who stuck by them through the trouble, and to this day it remains the most popular MMO of all time.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is another good example of an immensely popular game that got off to a rocky start. At the time, players said it didn’t feel right compared to the original Counter-Strike, which a majority of the fan base continued to play. After tweaking the feature set, players began to trickle in and now it’s the biggest e-sport on the scene.

Is No Man’s Sky a Slow Burner?

Looking back on the previous examples, we can isolate a few interesting aspects to these slow-starter games.

Their poor starts were due to either underestimating technical limitations, or underestimating the wants of their player base. They tended to be marketed to a player base that already existed and was being served by other games in the genre. They rewarded players that stuck around. They drastically shifted the way the game was played over time. They provided a hook for players to get back in.

Putting these elements together, we saw these games undergo a sort of “rebirth,” a second release if you will. This second chance was fueled organically through the hype and actions of existing fans, and allowed players to come back for a pseudo re-release.

Knowing that, let’s examine No Man’s Sky and see if it has any hope of rekindling the hype it had when it was first announced.

No Man’s Sky didn’t suffer from technical limitations, but it did suffer from feature limitations. The new patch will drastically change the way the game is played to better fit with player expectations. While no explicit reward has been mentioned for players that stick around, the new gameplay could be considered a reward in itself.

But No Man’s Sky is not being served by an existing fanbase. World of Warcraft had Warcraft 3 fans behind it, Diablo III had Diablo II fans, and CS:GO had the original Counter-Strike fanbase. And as you look on toward similar games with rocky starts, such as FFXIV and Grand Theft Auto Online, you can see that each and every one had a fanbase ready and willing to come back to it. They were eager to bite into the game when it’s “rebirth” occurred, fixing past problems and rewarding dedicated fans.

Looking to the Past to Find Hope

You might think that this means No Man’s Sky has no hope of regaining its popularity, but that’s not entirely true. Look back beyond the modern day, when patching and updates were common for games like Earthbound and Secret of Mana. While we look back at these games fondly these days, it’s easy to forget that they had rocky starts during their initial releases. They eventually found their way into the hearts of gamers everywhere because they appealed to a market that hadn’t quite risen to prominence yet. We all had to grow a bit before games like those came into their own.

And that might be what No Man’s Sky is experiencing right now. When No Man’s Sky first released, it tried to appeal to the hordes of gamer that think bigger is better. It certainly was bigger, but it wasn’t really better. Huge open worlds continue to be a selling point these days, but No Man’s Sky proved that buzzwords aren’t enough to sell games.

But this new update has essentially turned No Man’s Sky into a brand new game, and one that is quite impressive. Provided the updates keep coming, I can see No Man’s Sky finding its way into the hearts of exploration fanatics everywhere. Those exploration fanatics didn’t bother with No Man’s Sky when it first came out; they were busy playing other indie titles like Subnautica. So maybe, just maybe, No Man’s Sky’s new update is setting things up for its core fanbase to re-discover the game as time goes on.

For more information on the No Man’s Sky Foundation Update, check out Hello Games’ official update video.