While I wouldn't quite call it a Journey Game (a la Elite Dangerous), it is very much not about The Destination.

People play it because they like to play it. The idea isn't to build an endgame character who can do anything and everything. The idea is to build a lot of different characters that do a lot of different things and so forth.

And, grain of salt, but based on my own personal experience and non-rigorous polling of the discord and reddit, the vast majority of regulars are just playing it seasonally. A new update/season drops and a lot of folk hop on to play it.

But it speaks to the fundamental nature of live games/MMOs/whatevers. Some (probably most...) people want to work towards goals and check boxes off. Every single thing they do is a pop-up saying how amazing they are. Call of Duty is the most well known example but it is also very much why games like (ugh) Kingdom Come Deliverance do so well. Number go up and everything you do Matters because the game told you it does.

But there are the weirdos (yo) who... kind of just like playing games? We don't need a pop-up saying we are a good boy because we either make our own goals or... we just like the way it feels to play a game. The Elite Game genre (not to be confused with the Elite series... which are Elite Games) tends to be emblematic of this but it is also what made Arena Shooters so popular in the day.

I don’t get how/why it’s still profitable for them to keep working on it - but I’m in full support.

It’s not to dissimilar to Minecraft in a number of ways, in a sense - there’s not really any drive to do anything in particular, it’s ultimately up to the player to do what they feel like.

It’s a literal sandbox, rather than a narrative experience. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, that’s perfectly fine!

I played about 75 hours of it back in 2019. Most of the time I was driven by the same thing that drives me to spend dozens of hours in open world RPGs wandering and finding stuff before doing the main quest. It also helped that it had good VR support, and I had just played a ton of Skyrim VR that same year.

But of course in NMS, there is no main quest to return to when things on the open road get slow. And you do not have the same had designed locations and loot to stumble across.

In retrospect I can see parallels with f2p games that are just an infinite numbers-go-up grind. The game is designed such that you do the same shit forever. (If my info is out of date though, I welcome corrections)

From the trailer I get the sense that it’s not so much just for NMS players but pushing the engine forward with meaningful changes. Sounds like this update especially benefited from improving the engine that has the work of benefiting this game and the game they are releasing next.