No Man's Sky for Mac release date rumours: Why No Man's Sky will land on Mac in 2016
No Man's Sky is the hot ticket for PC and console gamers right now, but will Mac gamers be left out of the procedurally generated space exploration fun In this article we sift through the rumours, hints and clues to speculate on whether and when No Man's Sky is likely to launch on the Mac.
And while we're waiting for No Man's Sky's Mac release date, there's a simple way to play the PC version of the game on any Mac. In the second part of this article we explain how to run the PC version of No Man's Sky on your Mac.
No Man's Sky is expected to arrive on PC and the PS4 console later in 2015, but when is it coming to the Mac We take a look at the No Man's Sky for Mac release date rumours to find out whether No Man's Sky will ever come to Mac OS X.
No Man's Sky for Mac release date rumours
No Man's Sky was announced at the VGX 2013 gaming conference, highlighted by Sony during its press event at E3 in June 2014, and finally shown off in depth at E3 2015 earlier this year, but we've still yet to hear an official release date for the game on any platform, let alone the Mac.
It's expected that No Man's Sky will arrive in the second half of 2015, and it's been confirmed that, whenever it does appear, the game will be available for PC and PS4. It currently seems unlikely that an Xbox One version of the game will be released, and a Mac launch is similarly not guaranteed.
If you want to find out more about No Man's Sky's PC and PS4 release, by the way - whether you're planning to run it on your Mac (as we explain below) or whether you've got a compatible console, you can do so on our sister site PC Advisor here: No Man's Sky release date rumours, gameplay features & trailers.
No Man's Sky is being developed and published by Hello Games, a small UK-based studio. Hello Games previously made Joe Danger, which we know mainly on iOS (it's in our roundup of the best racing games for iPad and iPhone, incidentally) but actually started out on PlayStation 3. It was also ported to Windows, Xbox 360 and PS Vita - but still hasn't appeared on Mac, five years after its original launch and more than two years after coming to PC. This may not be a good omen.
But if we look for clues outside the (tiny) Hello Games portfolio, perhaps the closest rival to No Man's Sky is Elite: Dangerous, which is already out - and available on Mac, too. It launched on PC in December 2014, and came out for Mac OS X five months later. (Other broadly similar games that might be worth keeping an eye on include the venerable space-exploration MMORPG Eve Online, which is available for Mac as well as PC, and on the other hand the upcoming Star Citizen, which has been confirmed for Windows and Linux only.)
We think the appetite is there (if it wasn't, it's hard to imagine that Elite: Dangerous would have been brought to OS X within five months), and a Mac port of No Man's Sky would surely do well - the hype around this game is immense. But it seems unlikely that Hello Games would have the resources or inclination to port the game to OS X themselves. If No Man's Sky does come to Mac, it's most likely to be a job taken on by a company like Feral, which specialises in PC-to-Mac ports. We'd expect to be looking at a timeframe of between six months and a year after the PC launch - so a late 2016 Mac launch is feasible.
We contacted Hello Games on email and Twitter this morning to see if there are any plans to launch No Man's Sky on the Mac. The team haven't got back to us yet, but we'll post their reply here if and when they do so.
How to play No Man's Sky on Mac
It looks like we've got a fair wait for the Mac version of No Man's Sky, but fortunately it's relatively easy to run PC games on a Mac - and, as we discussed above, No Man's Sky is expected to launch on PC later this year.
If you want to run the PC version of No Man's Sky on your Mac, take a look at our article on how to install Windows on a Mac, which will enable you to run Windows-compatible software on your Mac, including PC-exclusive games.
As for the official Mac OS X version of No Man's Sky - well, it looks like a fair old wait. But we'll keep you updated with any news we hear, whether good or bad; bookmark this page for updated news.
For now, you should find a new game that takes your fancy in our roundup of the best games for Mac. And as we said, remember too that Elite: Dangerous is available on Mac: it's not quite the same, but for space exploration hijinks it might be your best option for the near future.