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Published Oct 12, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT
Giovanni Colantonio is a video game journalist who has covered the industry for two decades. He was formerly a senior editor at Digital Trends and has contributed to publications like Inverse, Fanbyte, and Hard Drive. His specialty is criticism, as he’s focused on a modern approach to video game reviews that’s focused on the nuances of how interactivity communicates to players. He is currently a member of the New York Video Game Critics Circle.
It even runs on an iPhone 11, says Hello Games
Image: Hello Games
A full 10 years after its release, No Man’s Sky is coming to a new frontier: mobile. Hello Games’ open-world sci-fi game is coming to iPhone and iPad in October, with preorders open today. The port will include all updates released over the past decade, and it will run on a range of devices as old as the iPhone 11. The technological feat was possible thanks in no small part to Light No Fire, Hello Games’ in-development No Man’s Sky follow-up.
Ahead of today’s reveal, Polygon attended a virtual roundtable with Hello Games founder Sean Murray, who explained the ins and outs of the project.
Development of the port began roughly three years ago, which would put it around the same time as the release of No Man’s Sky’s Mac port in 2023. While Murray said that a "sensible game developer” would conclude that the game couldn’t run well on a phone, the team at Hello Games were excited about taking on an “impossible” challenge.
The end result certainly does sound impossible. The mobile version features every update the game has gotten up to this point, including September’s Cosmos DLC. The only concession is that it doesn’t feature settlements and multiplayer, two features that the game also launched without on Nintendo Switch, though Murray implied that they could potentially come to the port later depending on community feedback. The port features full touch controls, redesigned menus, controller support, and mouse and keyboard support on iPad.
More shocking is the range of devices it runs on. Murray says No Man’s Sky can be played on anything from an iPhone 11 upwards for phones, and the iPad Air generation 3 and up for iPads. The entire game, with all of its content, also comes in at under 5 GB.
No Man's Sky on iPhone
How is that possible? Murray chalks it up to Hello Games’ need to optimize over the years to keep the game running well on PlayStation 4, where the game first launched. But while the team’s multiplatform strategy is part of the equation, some of the optimization needed to get the game running on mobile was born from Light No Fire.
“To bring it to iPhone and iPad, we’ll have, without people realizing it over the last few years, resulted in a better experience on those other platforms. Because we have had to think really hard about where are we going to get this performance from, and how are we going to fit in our memory profile better,” Murray told Polygon. “And some of those changes have come from Light No Fire. Things that we’ve been doing there where we’ve had to make things more performant, we’re going, oh, we can carry that across to all of this. It’s all one shared engine.”
No Man's Sky on iPad
Announced at the 2023 Game Awards, Light No Fire is a mysterious multiplayer survival game that relies on procedural generation. We’ve barely gotten a glimpse of it since its first teaser, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming one of the top wishlisted games on Steam. Speaking to press about how much of the team is currently split between Light No Fire and No Man’s Sky, Murray noted that it “ebbs and flows” because so much work is shared between the two games.
“Sometimes we’re developing on Light No Fire and it creates an idea, and we think, that would be really cool on No Man’s Sky,” Murray said. “Voyagers was an example of that, where we developed some technology on Light No Fire that we then thought, this would allow us to do these ships people could fly around in in No Man’s Sky … There are benefits when we do that for both projects. Light No Fire is then getting technology tested and hardened.”
No Man’s Sky will launch for iPhone and iPad on Oct. 28. It will cost $19.99, though players will have the option to play a free trial before buying. Light No Fire does not have a release date yet.
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