What is it about?
As games increasingly launch as incomplete digital products, players are encouraged to report problems to developers—essentially performing unpaid labor—while enduring aggressive update schedules. Since its release, No Man's Sky has undergone 33 updates in an effort to fulfill its initial marketing promises. While the player community often perceives this as 'developer passion,' it actually reflects a broader industry trend where live products demand continuous player commitment and contribution. Players engage with these unfinished games under precarious conditions, as each update risks erasing or altering their creations.
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Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash
Why is it important?
While the digital game industry is often criticized for its pump-and-dump strategy—releasing incomplete products and relying on post-launch updates—it rarely accounts for the toll this approach takes on players' valuable leisure time, which becomes entangled in the constant cycle of fixing, adapting, and waiting for promised improvements.
Perspectives
My mission is to uncover and analyze the forms of consumer labor embedded in video games. While I am unsure whether the concept of an "update struggle" fully encapsulates this phenomenon, I see it as a starting point for a broader discussion on what defines consumer labor, the audience commodity, and digital labor in game cultures.
Daniel Nielsen
Univerzita Karlova
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Virtual Migrations and Meta-Innovations: Update Struggle in No Man's Sky, Games Research and Practice, April 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3709605.
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