In context: One part SimCity, one part tower defense, Factorio was featured as one of our picks for great games you can play on budget PCs. That's because despite being in Steam Early Access, it is fully functioning, easy on the hardware, and very fun.
Wait. Did I just say Factorio is in Early Access? Scratch that. That's right, Factorio just officially moved to Version 1.0 last Friday. Last year, Prague-based developer Wube Software pegged September 25 as its release date. However, it decided that an eight-year wait was long enough, so why put it off any longer. The game is officially complete.
Wube began working on Factorio in 2012. It launched a funding campaign on Indigogo the following year, raising only a mere $25,643 with 1,776 backers. With such slim support it is no wonder the game got off the ground at all, yet by 2016, Wube was ready to release it to Steam's Early Access program.
More than 2,000,000 people have bought the game to date. According to Steam Charts, since its official release on Friday, it has seen a 20-percent rise in interest, reaching a peak of 32,392 concurrent players. The demo for the game spiked over 240 percent. That is not enough to put it in the top ten of most played games (Warframe is number 10 with 65,608), but the demo is currently trending in the number 2 spot just behind The Surge 2. So we could see those numbers grow.
Not much has changed with Factorio 1.0. It is still all about building massive automated factories and defending them from the angry denizens as your facility destroys their environment. Version 1.0 did get a pretty impressive fresh coat of paint, though.
If you have not played Factorio, you can try the demo for free on Steam. If you want the full version, it'll cost you $30, which isn't bad considering the game is 100's of hours of fun. Some of our staffers have been playing it for years.