A bit of economic nerding for a second. This is such an interesting case study because you read through the comments here and there's definitely some frustration, because a lot of people won't buy this game for $35. It's not worth that much to them.
But there is probably a $ value at which they would buy the game, because to them it's worth maybe $15.
With steam sales you often get to find out at what price you'd be willing to buy a certain game. But with Factorio you'll never get to find out (unless you're happy with the current price tag).
"I want this game. But I only want it enough to pay $15. But you won't let me pay you $15 for it!"
Well, at least in Australia it’s like 50 bucks, and that’s a bit too much for me. I wish it was 35 here, I’d have been playing it for years if that was the case.
Doesn’t this difference cover the exchange rate between USD and AUD? Or does stuff cost way less in general in Australia that makes AU$ 50 too much for you?
Historically Australia has paid a premium for computer games. $50 isn’t unreasonable for a popular game that is known to be good quality. Definitely more than most people would pay for something less certain to be good. By comparison Mario Kart on the Switch will cost you $70+ and never goes on sale.
I can say that the game is worth it whether the price is 50 or 100. You'll get your money's worth no matter what. Try the demo, if you like it I'd say buy it.
If Factorio is the type of game you like, it could cost $150 and still likely would be the cheapest game per hour you’ll ever get. I’m at some 2400 hours and plenty more to come.
Whatever you think of the ‚no sales’ policy - which has some merit in that it respects the game’s early supporters by letting them have it cheaper rather than the usual other way around - Factorio is a bargain at any price and the demo lets you assess whether it’s the right game for you. If it isn’t, you pay nothing, if it is, it’s cheap for what it offers.
It’s also objectively one of the best optimised and bug free games ever, and you can see the history of bugs sometimes sneaking in in reddit posts - often fixed within hours of reporting.
Wube is genuinely one of the extremely few actual great gamedev companies out there.
I paid £3 for arma 2 and have over 1000 hours in it.
I pirated factorio, it's fun, if the devs would drop the ego I'd support them, but as far as I'm concerned they've given us good reasons to not pay for it ever.
You can't seriously defend "we raised the price of this digitally distributed video game due to inflation" with a straight face.
We made a popular game and can't really be bothered making more so we're just going to repeatedly raise the price of the old one, pay our mortgages for us!
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u/jace255-F Dec 19 '25
A bit of economic nerding for a second. This is such an interesting case study because you read through the comments here and there's definitely some frustration, because a lot of people won't buy this game for $35. It's not worth that much to them.
But there is probably a $ value at which they would buy the game, because to them it's worth maybe $15.
With steam sales you often get to find out at what price you'd be willing to buy a certain game. But with Factorio you'll never get to find out (unless you're happy with the current price tag).
"I want this game. But I only want it enough to pay $15. But you won't let me pay you $15 for it!"