Light No Fire has just 12–20 devs — same size as No Man's Sky at launch

Full text

Light No Fire , the anticipated open-world survival game from the No Man's Sky devs, only has a small team working on it - but that's ok because it's the same size as the No Man's Sky team was at launch.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, Hello Games founder Sean Murray revealed that "around the same amount of people" are working on Light No Fire as the number that are still churning out updates for No Man's Sky ( which announced its tenth anniversary update, Cosmos, earlier today ). "Day to day," Murray says, that means "anywhere between 12 and 20 people."

That means that "an average team size" is around the number of people that were working on No Man's Sky at launch - "about 15 people." That's something in the region of 30 developers across two very large games - when you consider Light No Fire's entire planet and No Man's Sky's entire universe, the amount of square footage each developer accounts for is pretty astonishing.

But that 30 devs means that Hello Games is much, much larger than it was before the release of its first game. Murray estimates that the average team size before launch was about six, so growing to 15 devs in time for launch "felt really big to us." Now, he recognizes that the team is still "very small," but says that "we have a lot of tools and tech that allow us to be quite productive."

It's not the first time that Murray has admitted that the "crazy ambitious" Light No Fire is "a lot for a small team." Perhaps that's why updates on the survival game, which intends to create an entire planet-sized open-world for players to explore, have been few and far between. For some fans, that's a positive - No Man's Sky's release suffered as a result of what many would describe as Murray's tendency to overpromise in the run-up to launch. But 2.5 years after Light No Fire's announcement, we've heard almost nothing about Hello Games' next release - perhaps it's time for that team to get a little bigger…

No Man's Sky updates like Xeno Arena take "2-3x" longer on Switch 2 and Steam Deck because Hello Games has to beat "impossible memory constraints," engineer says .