If you’re a fan of No Man’s Sky, you may know that there’s a new feature known as Xeno Arena, which shipped with update 6.3 on April 8. The easiest way to explain it is by saying it’s essentially like porting Pokémon (or Palworld) mechanics into the game, as alien creatures from the world of No Man’s Sky can now be captured, raised, trained, and battled in the titular arena.

Xeno Arena is a completely free update that ships with every platform, but a recent post from an engine programmer at Hello Games, Martin Griffiths, details why updates like these can take “2-3x more” development time. Catering to low-power handhelds such as the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck forces devs to worry a lot more about memory limitations.

Optimizing for handhelds takes way more dev time than PC or console

In a post on X, Martin Griffiths says it takes “a disproportionate amount of engineering time” to get No Man’s Sky updates like Xeno Arena to play nicely on devices such as the Nintendo Switch (1&2) and the Steam Deck. Of course, the new features have to be up to scratch, optimized, and work as intended on all platforms – not just for PC or console users.

“A bunch of us at Hello Games probably spend 2-3x more time to make these updates seamlessly work,” says Griffiths, referring to making the updates viable for handheld users. “It’s really a delight to constantly beat impossible memory constraints,” he adds.

The Steam Deck has just 16GB of unified memory, while the original Switch offers a measly 4GB of system RAM. While the Switch 2 upgrades this to 12GB, only 9GB of that is available for games (the remaining 3GB is for the operating system). It’s a major contrast to your average gaming PC, which typically – according to Steam – has 16GB of system RAM and an 8GB graphics card.

Griffiths was also keen to point out some of the significant Nintendo Switch 2 optimizations that came with update 6.3 last week. According to the patch notes, rendering performance has been improved by “up to 15%” on the Switch 2, along with a fix for “a number of crashes” related to the Nintendo Switch platforms.

With an ever-evolving game like No Man’s Sky, we can imagine that these demands have only gotten greater over time – especially as hardware like the Steam Deck ages. It’s worth noting that NMS is Steam Deck Verified, and we imagine Hello Games will want to keep it that way, especially since we tend to see Deck player counts surge following any major update.

No Man’s Sky will reach its 10th anniversary this year, and it’s obvious to say that the game has come a long way since its disastrous launch. Xeno Arena is just another great example of free content being put out by Hello Games.

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Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.