Few games have followed the trajectory of No Man's Sky. The hype was massive, the launch was disappointing. And within three years, fans were demanding special exceptions for refunds on Steam, even putting up life-size "thank you" signs. It's one of the greatest comeback stories in video game history.

Hello Games recently released "The Last Campfire," a very different, smaller-scale gaming experience, but the studio has no plans to stick exclusively to this style of game in the future. Founder Sean Murray told Polygon that the studio is currently planning another "huge, ambitious game like 'No Man's Sky. He did not reveal anything about it (except for details that some people at the studio are currently working on this "big" game), but did share some thoughts on lessons learned from the launch of "No Man's Sky."

"There's this poison chalice or deal with the devil that any indie game developer would feel is actually a very difficult choice. 'You have a tremendous interest in your game, and you feel great excitement about it. But you are launched into the sun on a rocket ship, and on the way up you have to build up the rocket. [And there is excitement and madness. There are hundreds of millions of hours played, there is a really happy community, and there is such ...

This "deal" seems to refer, at least in part, to Hello Games' marketing partnership with Sony, which included the game in its presentation at E3 2014. This caused expectations to rise quickly, and some confusion when it began to appear that the game might be a PlayStation 4 exclusive. (As it turned out, the PC version was released only a few days after the PS4 launch.)

That doesn't mean Murray wants to repeat the process, especially considering the impact it had on the Hello Games staff. That was a very, very difficult process," he said, "and I wouldn't want to put anyone through that again.

The success of "No Man's Sky" (still a Steam Top 100 regular four years after its release) may mean that the studio has the stability and experience not to repeat the past. The studio took the exact opposite approach last week with the surprise distribution of "The Last Campfire" on the Epic Games Store; Murray said he is unsure how he wants to handle the next installment.

"We've done a lot of different press opportunities and things like that, and we looked back. And I think about half of what we did, a lot of the places where we had problems that I think we were naive, we really didn't have to do and we would have had the same level of success. A lot of opportunities were put in front of us and we were told it was the right thing to do, but in retrospect, I don't think it was super-duper important to the overall outcome."

He is not alone in thinking so: in 2016, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, was also critical of Hello Games' approach, stating that it "was not a great PR strategy."