You may have heard recently that all future updates to No Man's Sky will be absolutely free. We do want to add a ton of features, like we've just discussed: Freighters, bases, these type of things. But we want to do it for free, Hello Games boss Sean Murray told Red Bull last week. You've paid for the game, so you should get this stuff without paying even more money. So no, there will be no paid DLC, just patches."
Yesterday, however, Murray walked back those remarks very slightly in an interview with the Daily Star. He told the site that he was perhaps naive when he ruled paid DLC out completely, adding that it could happen if maybe in the future there s some reason why we just couldn t possibly afford to do a certain feature without charging for it.
Naive or not, I'd be a little surprised to see paid DLC come to No Man's Sky. It has 18 holymolymillion planets (or whatever) straight out of the box, and the whole thing is so dependent on procedural generation that a purpose-designed add-on of any significance would probably stick out like a sore thumb. What kind of expansion could you bring to a game of this style and scope that isn't going to look like a spoiler and ground effects screwed onto your dad's Malibu?
Meanwhile, charging for updates that simply improve the systems already in place would be ill-advised, especially with the game already taking so much criticism for failing to live up to the promises of its pre-release marketing. If your updates are perceived as fixes, fairly or not, you sure don't want to be asking people to fork over more money for them though it doesn't sound like that's the plan going forward, and any paid DLC is a hypothetical scenario.
Bottom line? Never say never when a firm probably not will do the job.
Thanks, Destructoid.