No Man's Sky NEXT launched on GOG, but without multiplayer

Hello Games have released No Man's Sky's massive update, branded NEXT, for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. PC master race has the game on Steam and GOG, but the latter won't have a multiplayer component at launch because it is DRM free.

No Man's Sky NEXT might be considered a mere large scale update by some, but it's definitely more like a resurrection process at the moment. The game was struggling to peak at 2.000 concurrent players since November 2017, but once NEXT landed, it sparked to life with concurrent player count hovering between 33.000 and 42.000 players. Even the Steam Charts overview looks like a heartbeat sensor of a dead person that came back to life.

Not all news are good though, as one of the major reasons for this resurgence is the addition of multiplayer that came with NEXT. Players who have the game on GOG won't be able to enjoy this feature just yet, due to the DRM-free nature of games on GOG.

All other features and new additions, including third person mode, upgraded visuals, better base building and customisation will be present from get go. The official is that it's hard for a small independent studio to pull a large scale update like this across several platforms.

With that in mind, the post did state that multiplayer will not be simply forgotten, but rather added later this year. Hello Games and GOG have apparently partnered up to bring this feature to the players as soon as possible and it should come on GOG Galaxy platform.

On the other hand, while some players are not affected by lack of multiplayer, they did take offence in being treated as second class customers.

Hello Games No Man's Sky

Thankfully, no one is actually blaming GOG for this, as the platform's strict no DRM policy has endured for years. The fact that multiplayer will be delayed on GOG could be considered to be a timed exclusive for Steam, much like the ones employed by Microsoft and Sony for their consoles.

There is no official confirmation on this, but it's still something gamers should keep in mind - companies will try different ways to enforce DRM.