‘No Man’s Sky’ Finally Touches Down on iPhone and iPad
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It’s been over three years since No Man’s Sky launched on Mac, and now it’s finally set to open the next portal into the Apple universe, coming to the iPad and iPhone later this month.
It’s been a decade since the epic, multi-galaxy-sprawling space exploration game first debuted, and while it’s come to a huge list of platforms over the years, most of Apple’s devices have been conspicuously absent. While it promised a Mac and iPad release in 2022, only the Mac version showed up — and it wasn’t until a year later.
The timing of the Mac release, only a few days before the unveiling of the Vision Pro at Apple’s 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), led many to wonder if we were in for a big reveal of a VR version for Apple’s new headset, but alas, it seems this was more of a coincidence than anything else. After all, the iPad version has taken another three years to show up.
To be fair, Hello Games, the developer behind No Man’s Sky, isn’t interested in doing any half-baked ports. The Mac version that arrived in 2023 was meticulously crafted, with the team working closely with Apple to take full advantage of the latest Metal 3 graphics APIs to “achieve console quality graphics whilst maintaining battery life on laptops and lower end devices.”
No Man’s Sky debuted for Mac on Steam, available at no extra charge for those who had purchased the PC version. At launch, Hello Games said it would be coming to the Mac App Store “shortly,” but that version never materialized. To this day, Steam is the only place you can get the Mac version.
That won’t be the case for the iPhone and iPad version, of course. In fact, you can find it on the App Store now, where it’s up for “pre-order.” Like many high-profile games, it’s a free download, but requires a one-time $20 in-app purchase to unlock the full game — which includes 10 years of updates. It doesn’t appear Hello Games is offering a free cross-grade for those who have purchased the Steam version, but the price seems reasonable, especially since this isn’t a pared-down “mobile” version.
As Hello Games notes in its announcement, iPhone and iPad users will be able to explore the full universe, complete with all the latest updates:
This is not No Man’s Sky Lite. It is the full universe to explore, complete with over forty major updates, including, COSMOS, which came out just a few weeks ago. It even includes our most ambitious updates like Voyagers from last year, which introduced the ability to build your own big rig starships (and which saw our player numbers jump to their highest levels since launch!).
The developer has also managed to offer pretty broad device support for what’s essentially a very demanding game. After all, No Man’s Sky generates its universe as you play — “at run-time” — which means it’s the iPhone in your hand that’s building the world you’re exploring, not remote servers in a cloud farm somewhere.
That makes it pretty impressive that the iOS version of the game will be playable on most Apple devices released since 2019 — the iPhone 11 and iPad Air (3rd generation). Basically, anything with an A12 Bionic chip or later that can also run at least iOS 26.
That said, there will be some restrictions, such as Planetary Settlements, which will be limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and later models — the same baseline for AAA console games like Resident Evil Village and Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
That’s likely because Apple debuted “a breakthrough new GPU” in the A17 Pro chip inside that model, with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and Metal effect upscaling. The cutoff will therefore likely be the same for No Man’s Sky on iPad, with the iPad mini (A17 Pro) and M-series iPad Air and iPad Pro models as the minimum requirement for Planetary Settlements.
As Hello Games’ CEO and No Man’s Sky creator Sean Murray told AppleInsider in 2023, bringing the game to the iPad was a much bigger challenge than they’d expected. The developer had brought plenty of other titles to the App Store, including the award-winning The Last Campfire, but No Man’s Sky turned out to be another story entirely. “Suddenly you have to consider a new user interface, battery life, things like that,” he said in an interview, “and you have to consider the audience and how they like to play their games.”
The team has seemingly taken the intervening three years to sweat those details, adding in today’s announcement that “we’ve put tons of work into battery life and thermodynamics” so the game can be “enjoyed for really long comfortable play sessions.” Touch controls have also been carefully designed to feel quick and intuitive, but the game also supports controllers, casting to TV, and even mouse and keyboard for iPad users.
On top of that, because the universe is generated at runtime, the game comes in at a fairly respectable 4 GB, making it downloadable directly from the App Store without the need to go out and fetch additional DLC at startup.
