No Man's Sky Reportedly Delayed Until July Or August

Quinten Plummer, Tech Times 26 May 2016, 08:05 am

No Man's Sky may be a no-show on its current June 21 release date, if reports hold true. Moreover, GameStop is preparing to slap "Coming Soon" stickers over posters that bear the June 21 date.

Developer Hello Games and its backers at Sony didn't immediately respond to Kotaku when questioned about No Man's Sky's delay. One of its regular sources and a GameStop insider told the gaming news outlet that the game would launch in July or August at the earliest.

Backing up the report that the game has been pushed back, GameStop stores were sent No Man's Sky marketing materials with memos directing employees to cover up the June 21 pieces of the game's display kits.

"The release date for No Man's Sky has changed since the provided posters were printed," says the memo. "Please use a coming soon pop-on to cover up the date and communicate as needed to your guest about the change of release."

No Man's Sky might be one of the most ambitious games ever created, especially for an indie studio with just more than a dozen employees. The game is so big, that Hello Games' Sean Murray has projected that all players of No Man's Sky, over the life of it, will only see about a combined 0.1 percent of the game's 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 procedurally generated planets.

If the game truly is pushed back, for whatever reason, it wouldn't be the first major setback Hello Games and its space exploration game has encountered. It might not even be the biggest setback.

In an April Interview with IGN, Murray offered details about why the game was nearly cancelled back in 2013. That was before Murray and Hello Games set the gaming world on fire one quiet evening in December of 2014, as the Game Awards.

"I think if we hadn't announced the game — I nearly backed out of it — I think if we had backed out of it, and then had been flooded, it's hard to know ... I think we might have canned No Man's Sky," Murray said in the interview. "Because we would have been feeling really unsure of it. When we were trying to back out of it, we were like, 'What have we been doing?'"

And if the game is truly pushed back, that may not necessarily be a bad thing. The studio may have worked out a new feature or improvement for the game, and might be throwing up deuces and yelling "YOLO" as it gambles with the release date of this long anticipated game - but that's all just speculation.