I've been gaming many years but I have never seen this before. No Man's Sky was released in 2016. Since then the developer/publisher has released many free updates which substantially improve and expand the game and is continuing to do it five years after the release. Any other publisher would release these updates as paid-for DLCs.

Hello Games appears to be a relatively small independent developer with no big company financial backing. It got me wondering who is funding all these updates? Most of the sales for any game happen in the weeks and months after its release. No doubt, some people are still buying No Man's Sky but I don't think it would be enough to pay for the work that has gone into the updates. It's like the developer just kept developing the game and adding more content for five years which everyone who bought the game gets for free.

Mind you, I'm not complaining. It would be wonderful if every game got this kind of support. I just hope that the people running Hello Games manage to stay in business.

I've been kind-of wondering the same thing.

It's like they're sort-of doing the MMO-model, but without the continuing revenue from subscriptions; and also no ads.

I'm closing in on 300 hours in my Survival game - had no idea I'd enjoy it that much to keep wanting to play it for so long (having only purchased it two-months ago).

I'd say that they are still selling enough copies to fund working on it (particularly with each big update). These sales along with the large number of sales at release are probably enough.

From this article released in late 2019 seem to indicate it still sells well:

https://kotaku.com/the-unexpected-success-of-no-man-s-sky-1833920840

“last year we sold the kind of numbers a AAA game would be happy with at launch,”

They likely just make the money from people buying more copies; another game which has also had multiple very large updates is Terraria (it was released in 2011 and has since had 4 major updates), but all of those have been free.

Most likely, the developers themselves. Games with constant updates (especially content ones) tend to sell well over the years and not just at launch. No Man's Sky, for instance, generated 24 million in revenue during the month of the multiplayer update's release (as well as the XBox One version).

For another example, Stardew Valley sold just 1 million copies two months after its launch. This increased to 10 million copies by January 2020.

The hype for NMS was huge, especially after the E3 trailer (which ended up being mostly doctored). They probably got millions in pre-orders.

+1 to copies sold sustaining them. My very rough math shows their after-tax revenue shows 19 years of burn left from NMS sales alone. They also have their Joe Danger mobile games and Last Campfire games to supplement their revenue.

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Sales: 4.9M on PS4 + 3.7M on XOne + 154,065 reviews * 41 sales/review on Steam = 14.9M sold.

14.9M sold * 0.70 dev cut * ~$20 USD average price = $209M total revenue

$209M - 19% UK business tax = $169M after-tax revenue

$169M / 5 years = $33.9M / year after-tax revenue

26 employees * ($20,000 / employee / month * 12 months / year) = $6.24M / year business expenses

Burn period remaining = [$169M - ($6.24M / year * (5 years since release + 3 years development)] / $6.24M / year = 19 years left

Pretty sure it's kinda normal now for games to do big free updates alongside a big Steam sale and sell a bunch more copies as a result. I assume that only works for so long, but it seems to be pretty common. No Man's Sky doing it profitably for so long is likely a result of its massive name recognition combined with the fact that genre sells so well in general now.