The Best Comeback Isn't Cyberpunk
This Sunday, August 9, No Man's Sky turns ten, and its birthday marks the most infamous faceplant in modern gaming. On launch day in 2016, more than 212,000 people were exploring its galaxy on Steam at once. By September, about 2,100 were left. The multiplayer players had been led to expect simply did not exist, and Sean Murray later admitted Hello Games had failed to control the hype. Critics quipped that the studio had procedurally generated 18.6 quintillion planets and forgotten to generate anything to do on them. The game became shorthand for broken promises. Then, across ten years and roughly forty named updates, every single one of them free, it became something else: the most complete redemption arc in entertainment. Not just in games. In entertainment. That is a fight-starting claim, so let's write the rules and have the fight.
What does redeemed actually require? Three tests. First, the failure has to be public and humiliating, a story even your friends who don't play games heard about. Second, the fix has to be real work sustained over years, not a patch and a press release. Third, and this is the test that eliminates most candidates: the thing has to end up beloved. Forgiven is not a comeback. Beloved is.
The obvious counterargument wears chrome. Cyberpunk 2077 fell harder than anyone: in December 2020 it ran so badly on consoles that Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store for six months. Its recovery peaked higher too, sealed by Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the anime that pulled over a million players a day back into Night City, and by early 2025 its Steam rating read Overwhelmingly Positive. A reasonable fan crowns it, and that fan is wrong for one reason we'll get to in the ranking.
One cut before we start: Destiny 2 misses the list entirely, not because it never came back but because it keeps coming back. A redemption you perform every other year is a business model, not an arc.
Here is the anniversary math that settles the argument. Buy No Man's Sky this week and you pay once, the same single price the 2016 disc cost, and receive the entire decade: the multiplayer that wasn't there, the VR mode, freighter fleets, settlements, fishing rods, gas giants, all of it in the box, with new updates still landing in 2026. Cyberpunk's comeback made a great game out of a broken one, and then it ended. Hello Games did the same thing and then kept going for ten straight years without ever sending a bill. Put it on tonight, land on a planet no human being has ever seen, and judge the apology for yourself.
