Coffee Stain’s first-person factory builder and automation game Satisfactory has finally left Early Access with its 1.0 release today, and so many players are currently having a go at it.
The game has upwards of 100,000 players currrently playing on Steam, an all-time high on the platform. The game is also available via the Epic Games Store, one of the first titles to launch there as a limited-time exclusive.
The highest concurrent players for Satisfactory previously peaked in the 30,000+ count, so this is a massive spike in interest. Even bigger than Factorio, the biggest and most influential factory builder game that argubly cemented factory builders as a subgenre of “grower” strategy games. Factorio has its highest peak concurrent number on Steam at 34,700.
That’s more than just a satisfactory amount of players.
The 1.0 update adds even more late-game buildings to build. And one more method of transportation: portals. If tube pipes, tractors, trains and little dinky karts are not enough options for mobility, now we’re tinkering with portals.
Satisfactory tasks you as an employee of a corporation sent to a specific planet to build and sent resources. You and your friends (there’s online co-op with server hosting) will have to do manual labour to gather some of the raw materials, but from there, you’ll be building an automation system that will extract, refine, combine, repackage and send raw materials into manufactured goods used to create more complex buildings and more complex materials. The map is pre-defined, there is some elements of hostility thanks to the local fauna, but how you weave your mess of conveyor belts is entirely up to you. And that ability of player expression, paired together with the satisfying problem-solving gameplay are what drives Satisfactory’s appeal.
And it sure is doing big numbers for what one would consider a niche genre. The folks behind Goat Simulator (that spawned a sequel and a recently-announced remaster) can do more than meme games, and it’s cool to see.
Satisfactory is out now on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store).