10 Video Games That Died (Then Came Back Stronger Than Ever)
3. No Man's Sky
It's simply impossible to discuss resurrected games without mentioning the poster child for them - No Man's Sky.
Hello Games' procedurally generated open-world sci-fi survival game was hugely hyped prior to release, only for the launch day version of the game to be a crushing disappointment.
Lacking many of the promised features such as multiplayer while touting a shallow central gameplay loop, No Man's Sky was understandably dismissed as yet another "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" game.
Though its first-week sales and player figures were encouraging, UK physical sales fell off a cliff in their second week, dropping a staggering 81%, while Steam's concurrent player count dropped to around 1% of its launch day traffic within a month of release.
But to Hello Games' credit, they knuckled down and spent the next few years iterating upon No Man's Sky with a series of free updates, adding base building, vehicles, multiplayer and VR support, and much more.
In fact, their efforts were concerted enough that in September 2021, more than five years after release, the game finally received "mostly positive" user reviews on Steam, after starting at "overwhelmingly negative."
That's one hell of a turnaround for a game that seemed dead-on-arrival when it first launched.