Hello Games engine programmer Martin Griffiths went on record this week to confirm what the studio's handheld players may have suspected: keeping No Man's Sky running smoothly on Switch and Steam Deck costs the team a disproportionate amount of time with every single update.
The numbers behind the extra work
Griffiths posted the breakdown publicly, and the figures are striking. "The mobile platforms like Switch 1 and 2, along with Steam Deck take a disproportionate amount of engineering time with every update we release," he wrote. "A bunch of us at Hello Games probably spend 2-3x more time to make these updates seamlessly work, exactly like the other consoles do along with PC/Mac etc."
That's not a small gap. For context, No Man's Sky has shipped more than 40 major content updates since launch, with 14 of those arriving in just the last two years. If the engineering team is spending two to three times longer on every handheld build, that's a significant slice of development time for a studio that, by all accounts, is not a large one.
What the recent update pace looks like
The scale of recent No Man's Sky updates makes Griffiths' disclosure even more telling. Worlds Part 1 and Worlds Part 2 effectively rebuilt the game's universe, adding billions of new planets alongside sweeping visual overhauls. The Voyagers update overhauled shipbuilding entirely and reportedly doubled the game's active player count. Most recently, Xeno Arena turned the whole thing into an alien-capturing experience that drew obvious comparisons to Pokemon.
Each of those updates had to be ported, tested, and optimized separately for Switch 1, Switch 2, and Steam Deck. The key here is that these aren't just resolution tweaks. The hardware architectures on handheld platforms differ enough from PC and console that the engineering work is essentially being done twice, at minimum.
A small team carrying a heavy load
Hello Games has always operated lean. The studio launched No Man's Sky with a team of around a dozen people, and while it has grown since, it remains far smaller than most developers shipping games across five or six platforms simultaneously. The fact that handheld support has stayed consistent through 40-plus updates, with the same feature parity as PC and console, reflects a genuine commitment to those player bases.
What most players miss is that this kind of behind-the-scenes engineering work is almost entirely invisible from the outside. You download the update, it works, and you move on. The 2-3x multiplier only becomes visible when someone on the team decides to say it out loud.
With Light no Fire still in development and No Man's Sky approaching its tenth anniversary, the question of how long Hello Games can sustain this pace across so many platforms is worth watching. For now, though, handheld players are getting the same updates as everyone else, and that's a harder thing to pull off than it looks. For more on No Man's Sky and other games, check out the latest gaming news on our site.
