•Developer Hello Games has brought its space exploration game No Man’s Sky to iPhone and iPad devices. The title launches on iOS on October 28, with all of the studio’s numerous updates included since its original release.
Hello Games says the game will run on devices going as far back as the iPhone 11, and pre-orders open today. A decade after its divisive launch and a subsequent years-long period of content additions, the universe now fits into players’ pockets.
“For nearly three years, we’ve had this little side project. There’s something incredible about this universe fitting in your pocket,” studio co-founder Sean Murray said in a deep dive video below. “We want console quality visuals and gameplay that you can play anywhere. We support touch, we support controllers, even mouse and keyboard.”
Sean Murray
Murray also explained that Hello Games has made “tons of tweaks and improvements” that should benefit players on all platforms — PC, PlayStation, Switch and Xbox included. But the team once believed a mobile port “would never be possible,” according to his comments.
The studio points to another reason the port can exist today: its upcoming game Light No Fire.
“We have had to think really hard about where are we going to get this performance from, and how are we going to fit in our memory profile better,” Murray said while speaking to Polygon. “And some of those changes have come from Light No Fire. Things that we’ve been doing there where we’ve had to make things more performant, we’re going, ‘Oh, we can carry that across to all of this.’ It’s all one shared engine.”
Sean Murray
Light No Fire has remained out of the spotlight since its reveal in 2023. It is a co-op adventure game set on a procedurally generated fantasy planet. While No Man’s Sky aims for the stars, the studio’s follow-up focuses on depicting one open-world planet rather than millions, “with no boundaries” this time.
Last month, Murray suggested that Light No Fire was quite far along, but he told Eurogamer that he’s learned a “very important lesson of not talking about things” too soon.
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