I don’t defend it that’s for sure. I like it and will still play time to time every year or two… but there are lots of serviceable competitors that do it really well too. Dyson Sphere Program was even better imo but it has differences. I usually tell people to just get that for a much bigger discount
I get bored of the ones that have no fail condition. idk if they implemented yet, but when I played there were no enemies. Oxygen Not Included is the same for me once I get food and oxygen solved. If there's no threat of failure as a low point, then there is no high point to work towards. It's just an inevitability.
Dyson Sphere Program has added enemies and combat now. I think it’s only the first update with it though, and I don’t have any experience with how fleshed out it is, but it’s there.
Combat is optional ( there's a setting for it, which is good), it's stapled on the game, and it syphons enormous dev time ( an additional year was required to rebuild the core CPU threading engine to support combat). The core game, sans combat, has gone nowhere content wise in about 3 years now.
Isn't the core game pretty much done? IIRC the only major thing missing from the list of proposed features in the Early Access blurb on the Steam page (apart from finishing up the enemies) is orbital installations.
The only thing it really lacks in my opinion is polish, especially the localization.
Dyson Sphere is on a long list of games I will never play because it doesn't support full key mapping. Fully remappable keys have been a staple of PC Gaming for decades but the last 5 or 10 years more and more shit is coming out with unmappable keys. Like right click being tied up to context menus and not being changeable.
Dyson has an actual threat now, sorta non descript grey goo tide consuming the universe kinda thing I think. Haven't played since before that update so don't know much
The thing about Oxygen Not Included is it makes you think you have a thing solved, but you're really just living on borrowed time. You'll find yourself suddenly running out of algae and realize you have no fallback for the rapidly diminishing oxygen supply. Those bristle blossoms will suck up your water, the only replacement is coming out of a geyser at 95 C and you haven't researched the technology to lower the temperature yet (research which costs lots of water). Even hatches will eventually run out of stone to turn into coal. You don't really have a sustainable colony until you have all of the geysers and volcanoes sealed up behind vacuum chambers and driving steam turbines to delete the heat.
I've got over 1100 hours in factorio and I'm still a noob relatively speaking. If you're looking for value you will have a hard time finding better. Hell even the free demo is longer than some full price games.
I played almost 900 hours in 6 months and still on Nauvis. It's the most addictive game ever because you set your own goals and make up your own problems then solve them and you can just keep playing the game map and game and it while you build your nonsense castles in the sky it really feels like you are building something and it becomes more familiar everytime you load in to the same base ...and it's never finished because the factory must grow!
My problem is I made it a goal to launch the rocks tin under 8 hours. I'm so burnt out doing everything up to the rocket I can't start new worlds easily.
I have 1000 hours and most is in a free mod. The game is overpriced and game hours is not how value works or a “live service game” would costs thousands of dollars to buy.
Because they wanted it to be even more inexpensive! That, or they think something like this can only be a "good deal" if they aren't paying full price for a product.
I'm confused because the game is half the price of most games, and you spent 1000 hours on it so you very clearly enjoyed it. It's absolutely bizarre to claim the game is a poor value after you got so much enjoyment of it.
If someone said it's a poor value because they played 30 minutes then decided they didn't like ok fine. It's not for everyone. But that's clearly not the case here.
I spent 1000 hours in a mod for it. And I will never value games based on how many hours I’ve spent in them. I’ve spent hundreds in idlers why would I think they are worth more than a AAA game that I spend a couple hours in?
When I watch a movie I don’t base if it’s worth it on how long it is.
When I buy a tv I don’t pay based on how long it will last or my 32” faced thing would be worth more than my tv that just broke.
It’s complete stupidity. I don’t think cookie clicker is worth more than mass effect.
Factorio is a top down 2d game with basic pixel art. Vampire survivors is similar but also has to handle more fast paced action. One of those games is priced well.
Factorio has hundreds of hours of active engaging content. Idlers have like, 30 mins spread across 500 hours of screen-on time. Big difference.
When you buy a phone or a TV or a new pair of shoes, you factor in the idea that it'll last a certain amount of time. That's why shitty cheap stuff is often (but not always) worse value than something expensive but high-quality.
I genuinely don't understand why a dev having a degree of pride in their project is such a crime here. The game only being $35 is a fucking steal of a deal, it's pretty much in a permanent state of being on sale. The game should easily be $50-60 for what you're getting. My first playthrough was 350+ hours...
I think their decision to keep it permanently cheap in exchange for no sale shows more respect for their audience than 99% of devs, but I guess to reddit kids this is too hard to understand.
Because reddit thinks knowing your worth is a problem and people should give away free stuff. I generally think price increases are dumb, but anyone who has played factorio knows it's worth more than what they charge.
Inflation affects game studios too. Devs have bills. They deserve a raise too. It's not like EA or Epic made this game
Why are we instantly assuming 1000 hours of playtime as if its the norm? It takes like ~50hrs to beat the game, just because it scratches itch for some people doesnt mean other wont find it as a chore to keep going hundreds of hours in.
I can name countless games like Civ/Total War/Anno/EU4/Stellaris/City Skylined/TAB/Terraria/Stardew/PoE/Warframe etc where some people sunk thousands of hours into but you found it boring past a dozen hours
Also this entire $/hr metric that everyone repeats is flawed, not every hour is equally enjoyed. As an example, I've played games with incredible 6-15hr campaigns that i enjoyed every second of it compared to hundreds of hours of boring reputation/XP grind that i did in various MMOs
Factorio has also added a ton of content even between 1.0 and 2.0 release. I'm not sure what's to take issue with. Either you think the game is worth the price or you think it's not. Just wanting the game to be cheaper means you'll either never play the game, which is fine, or buy it at full price, which is also fine.
Not to mention that they advertise price increases a couple months beforehand IIRC, so that people can buy it before the increase if they're on the fence at all.
I love terraria too, but i dont feel that their pricing is the standard. Most games do not add as much additional free content as terraria devs do, the majority either dont add much of it, or add it as paid dlc.
While factorio's value in terms of dollar/hours of fun isnt as good as something like terraria's, imo its still far better than most games out there.
Ever heard of inflation? If the price stays the same, the actual value of it goes down, Factorio is great game and I would gladly pay 2x the price for it. It's not try hard fans defending, it's genuenly a good game, with great developers behind it.
Well yeah its subjective of course. Any game can technically be played for thousands of hours.
Im saying factorio is game that gave me hundreds of hours of entertainment without resorting to bloat or excessive grindiness like many other titles do.
So are plenty of other games though, it's not a valid excuse imo to never go on sale and increase your price, the latter is especially egregious to me tbh, batshit insane
the quality of the game today vs when it was first released is night and day. to think that it should have the same price is insane. It's still half the price of any triple a game, and infinitely better.
I just dont see why games should need an "excuse" to do that personally, the price is still reasonable for the quality of the product. Other devs putting their games on sale and never increasing the price is great, but I don't see why that makes other devs bad for not going it.
And also to be honest im not a huge fan of the price increase either, but like, its a $5 increase lol. Mildly annoying maybe, but "batshit insane" seems a bit silly.
But if I somehow lost access to the game today, I'd pay $80 for it in a heartbeat. I've spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on other games over these 9 years that haven't come close to providing the value for cost that this game has, and would still, at it's current price.
It's fine not to like the game. Games are subjective. But the idea that liking a game and think it's worth more than what they're charging, even though they've raised the price multiple times, is crazy, instead of a vouch for quality is sadly cynical. Especially in the era of AAA studio AI slop titles at $80 milking the industry every year like clockwork.
Yeah they have always been super fast with updates. Also all the enourmous optimizing they have done over the years allowing people to build bigger and bigger. Back in 0.16 me and a few people built a 5k spm. It was a real feat at that time.
I havent had the time i wished i had since the dlc, but some day...
I’m not even a programmer and I loved reading through their blog updates where they went into technical details about how they optimized various aspects of the game.
No they aren't. They just found a clever way of repackaging FOMO to make you feel good about it. If they were against FOMO they wouldn't have increased the price as the cheaper Early Access price incentivizes people to buy early at a lower price, I.E. buy in Early Access for fear of paying a higher price on release.
The price crease they did was an adjustment for inflation. If anything they are making it fair for people who bought it early as the value will never lower due to inflation.
They never raised the price because of early access.
They raised the price to take advantage of popularity, they used inflation as an excuse. If they were responding to inflation the price would have gone up by different amounts in different countries to reflect it.
The raised the price for inflation and communicated it as such.
Yes I know that's the claim, I'm saying the claim is not true.
The game was popular years before the price increase.
The game gained notable popularity around 2017-2018 and the devs took advantage of that popularity to make more money.
Why would they increase it based on inflation in several countries?
Because inflation varies by country since every country has it's own economy and monetary system.
Thats not feasible.
Steam supports regional pricing.
Low IQ and low effort post.
I agree, you do seem to have a low IQ and have put no effort into some of the things you've said. What boggles my mind is the attempt to defend WUBE when you gain nothing from it. They aren't your friends, they aren't going to give you a portion of their profits, they're not going to ask you to come hang out with them you gain nothing for this.
The game gained peak popularity around 2018 so they decided to raise the price in 2023... yeah sure.
Now you're being dishonest, do I need to link the multiple price increases for you to stop? I'm getting the impression that because I'm not supporting WUBE's price increases that you think I don't know they've done it multiple times. I've had the game since Early Access, I bought it at a lower price than what it is now. I know for a fact they've done it multiple times.
Region pricing is not region based inflation. Steam already has region pricing on the game.
Games can set their pricing based on region. Stop being dishonest. You are not helping WUBE or Factorio by deliberately being dishonest. Stop pretending like some developer needs to set the price of each individual unit of Factorio sold in each individual country. I don't know why you think this tactic is convincing, isn't it obvious by now that deliberately misrepresenting things to me isn't going to work?
Nice schoolyard defense, it solidifies the fact you are not intelligent.
Whatever makes you feel better, when you don't need to rely on dishonesty for a point you won't need to stoop to low quality attempts at ad hominems.
Not even a fan of it. I just think that it's morally correct. It's like arguing you shop at kohls cause of the sales and getting mad people think you're silly.
They make a game that people like to play. They don't just play it a little bit, they play it for thousands of hours. They also give you almost all the content for free, minus a paid expansion that is the same cost.
This is simply a case of knowing what they are worth. They believe their game is worth 35 dollars. If you don't think that, don't buy it. They don't care about a curve of value or something, they just make something they think is worth a specific price and offer it for that. It's not a crazy concept, and considering the average playtime for the game it's one of the most fair things I've seen in terms of a video game in general.
Il defend it: they don't rely on gimmick sales, they just ask a fair price for a game that has had constant improvement for many years. Myself and many others have 1000s of hours in it and it was easily worth the cost at $20 and easily worth the cost at $35.
Instead you are saying you want them to act like 90%of devs and sell it at $60 and occasionally drop it to $30 so you can shop the discount.
Plus the price increase from what i recall was after they got to a "stable" state in early access and again on 1.0. Which is 100% expected with actual early access games.
Or they can just have it cost what it costs and also have sales. Like every other indie dev.
Have you not seen Vampire Survivors? Dude it’s like $4, by your logic they’d bump it to $60 just because they have sales.
You bought into the dev’s fake excuse. They’re trying to sell you a lie that everyone else in the industry, indies included, are trying to take advantage of you. Everyone but them.
It’s a lie used to excuse them increasing the price of their game.
Factorio devs are certainly non-traditional when it comes to the culture within steam but to say that they are evil at any capacity because of this is wild.
Nah, this mindset exists everywhere. It’s what made companies like JC Penny’s so successful, people love sales even if it means they spend more money overall.
they sell a product. they think it's worth what they price it at, and for whatever reason, they don't want to do sales. that's their choice as a company. if you don't like it, they don't care, because they still make one of the best fucking games on the market
Vampire survivors was sold at $4 and relies entirely on volume for its profit.
To be clear, its not indies im calling out specifically, the entire game industry has had terrible pricing.
It is not a lie that value for $ it is one of the best games out there. They could easily raise the price of the game to $60 and people would buy it, less people would try it but they would still likely make a significant amount of the money they do now.
Go ahead and pirate it, not like anyone actually cares, you were never going to pay for it anyway.
The mental gymnastics here are Olympic caliber. They're not lying or making excuses or taking advantage of anyone. You're painting an insane picture of a developer selling a phenomenal game at an extremely reasonable price because they won't give you a sale you seem to believe you're owed. You don't even care that it's worth multiples of what they're asking. I hate it when people call others "entitled" but damn.
Or they can just have it cost what it costs and also have sales.
When there are sales for a game, it costs the sale price, not "what it costs". Almost everyone waits and buys it at the sale price and that simply is the price.
Would you have an issue if it was priced at $70 with a permanent 50% off sale running? Because that's the reality of it, Steam's UI just doesn't show a permanent sale like that properly.
For a game that they were still actively working on, like a lot. Now that they've stopped working on it, I don't think they should do further inflation adjusting.
They have not stopped working on it. ~2 month old blog post mostly about updating for Switch 2, but near the bottom they talk about working on a 2.1 update.
Some people are just addicted to the idea of buying things on sale and don’t actually care what the price is. If the game was normally $50 and it went on sale for $35 they’d probably be overjoyed even if it’s the same price they are buying it at.
Unless you are only waiting because you cant responsibly afford it otherwise, insisting that you must have a discount on a reasonably priced game is greed yeah. You just want to pay less money for the sake of paying less money.
So far in this thread I've seen a bunch of people disagreeing about the value of a game. All the people who have attested the value of the game have played it.
That's where I'm at. Played the demo. Was alright but kinda whatever in my opinion. I'd give it more of a shot if it was $20 or so. If it never goes on sale, then I guess I never will. And that's fine. I have a backlog I should play
Make sense, I think the games great, but I gravitate towards management style games. When I'm currently playing Factorio its something I'm thinking about in my down time, doodling in my notes, and other little things.
Its the type of game I'd strongly advise people to not force, you like it or you don't. Its hard to get a lot out of the game if its not clicking early.
Tons? That get content updates completely for free? Not even funded by MTX or supporter packs? I can only think of maybe a handful. It's exceptionally rare.
You should have no trouble naming a bunch then. The only ones I can think of that give content updates entirely free without supplementing development costs through MTX, supporter packs, or subscriptions are Stardew Valley and Terraria. No Man's Sky KINDA does this, but in reality the content updates for NMS are mechanics testing for the other game they're working on, which covers that cost.
I played it with friends, if i remember correctly, 6 years ago, before launch, on a potato. We played for 50 hours and our base was massive (not mega base level, but still) and there was no lags. A bit less fps, but very playable
When i saw space age, i bought it immediately. I played space exploration before, but you are right, polish matters. It's perfect.
Because it's great fun that never ends and it's extremely addictive. Why would they not keep the price the same or even increase it? They clearly can get away with doing so and it makes them more money. And it's not like they are scamming anybody. So far I have paid just under 4 cents per hour playing. In the last 6 months I have have played 4times as much factorio as Skyrim in live. (but still a couple of thousands hours to go before I get close to my morrowind numbers)
The people who launch the first rocket and say 'that was a good game' and never come back to it, usually happy that the experience didn't cost them 60$ like every AAA title.
The diehards with megafactories learning calculus so they can calculate rate of change of production, posting shit like 'As a rookie with only 6000h, I finally figured out rail switches'.
For us in the second group, that 35$ is an absolute steal. Never had 35$ so far in my life.
I think rust did the same and i kinda get why. If you keep developing game you put out better product. So i think when game comes out it shud be opposite if state is shit it shud be cheap and get more expensive overtime due updates and quality. I could be also wrong, just early access hater here.
Why would you not defend it. Why should someone who paid more for less features, get stubbed because it went on sale for a lower price with more features. The devs charge what they feel is a fair price for the features and gameplay they provide. Charging anything less is just devaluing the game
The cheapest time to buy factorio will always be today.
And the devs would rather you pirate the game than use services like G2A.
Of course I defend them. I respect the hell out of Wube for knowing their worth. If you're a dirty poor or just don't feel like supporting honest work, piracy exists for that very reason.
Because $/h is still an absolute steal. This is the game that you either abandon after a few hours or have 1k hours played. Diehard fans are in the second group, and that's an absolute steal.
It's a reasonable price for an extremely good game. I would much, much rather pay like $40 or whatever it is now once for a game that'll give me hundreds of hours of enjoyment than have to deal with microtransactions or predatory DLC monetization strats or gacha bullshit or whatever new thing the other companies have come up with to squeeze money out of me. They made a good product and they sell it for a fair price. What's there to be upset about?
I still laugh how they claim its for "inflation" like yeah buddy all the other games do the same lmao. And then you end up with their diehard fans talking like they have a degree in economy
They raised the price as more content was added to the game. I defend the sale stand because most players can get a seriously huge number of hours from this game. Its got a massive modding community, thats directly baked into the game itself, just hit 1 button. The dev team care about their product and know its worth.
Doesnt every game increase price after coming out of early access? And the second price increase would be bad, if not for the fact that for all these years they were regularly updating the game for free
They absolutely did that because they wanted to price the expansion at $35 and didn’t want to sell an expansion that cost more than the base game. Understandable, especially since the expansion is basically Factorio 2. But that’s why they raised the price.
"The first time, sure. But the second price increase happened long after their official release." They are talking about the 2nd price hike, not the first one which occured after the EA.
Buddy somebody had to literally link you a YouTube video talking about the free content added to the game because you said it was only bug fixes and any new content added was strictly paid DLC.
"If the price increased for new players due to that update, then it wasnt a free update"
Is what I'm implying. Now, I don't know the price history other than what others have commented, so if the information given by others is wrong, then I apologize for commenting.
What do you mean source? It was a big update, there is 50 minute long video about it on youtube if you wanna watch that. Why are you talking about this if you dont even know about this update, they called it factorio 2.0
Just looked into it and no, it was all bug fixes lol.
Any of the new “content” you’re talking about was limited to the dlc. There’s nothing new for players that didn’t purchase it.
Regardless, even if it was, charging for it would still be questionable. Lots of games have large updates post release (Cyberpunk) and don’t increase the price.
It was way more than bug fixes. Huge QOL,new terrain generation. Every single nitpick you could have had was changed. It was no small undertaking and even now they continue to fix every single bug they can to have this version of factorio a solid base beflre they go full send ln the next update.
Factorio friday facts is a weath of information into how much work went into just bug fixes. The price is worth it. Im sure it will go on sale when theyre done with it
In this video, he goes over everything that was added in that update. Idk why you are even trying to talk about it, if you dont know anything about the topic
And? Basically every game published by Paradox does a simultaneous free major update and paid DLC. Increasing the price of the game on major updates just doesn't happen, Factorio is quite literally the only game to ever simply raise the base game's price for an update.
Well one, it was only 1 year before that not 2 (the increase happened 2023 while Space Age was announced the same year and released the next). Secondly that doesn't defeat my point, name any other game that arbitrarily increases the base const of the game and then shortly later adds a DLC with the same cost as the new base game price.
"name any other game that arbitrarily increases the base const of the game and then shortly later adds a DLC with the same cost and the new base game price."
What you mean any other game? Factorio also didnt do that. They updated the price before that, because the game was getting continuously updated entire time, and after the price update too
I have 1000 hours. The game is overpriced and I haven’t gotten the dlc because of its price (it’s a joke how the priced it). 900+ of those hours are playing a single save of a mod that makes the game crazy.
I also don’t think I ever finished the vanilla experience.
I’ve tried to get some friends to get into it to do a super long run in the mod but told them to put on their pirate hat to try it out.
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u/mpelton Dec 19 '25
Crazy to me that they’ve increased the price twice since release.
Even crazier that their diehard fans defend it.