Factorio's expansion is setting record high player counts yet again so I'm expecting the world's IT infrastructure to collapse and innovation to stagnate any day now
I'm here today to announce a dire portent. An issue that may or may not be disastrous for modern technological society. The Factorio: Space Age expansion is doing very, very well. After peaking at a record-setting 91,801 players on launch week, this weekend we've hit 118,674 players—more than triple the total we saw when Factorio launched its 1.0 release in 2020. This most illustrious of factory-building games is like catnip for engineers, coders, systems administrators, process designers, IT personnel, and also me.
Sure, it's the weekend now and that's responsible for the spike in peak player count... but what happens when their minds turn to The Factory, And How It Must Grow come Monday morning when they're supposed to be working? In a year already overrun with good factory games—surely hindering their productivity to date—we are seeing yet another monumenal release. I fear we shan't survive.
So, with a grain of salt, I'd recommend we all prepare for the full-scale collapse of technological civilization as we know it. Engineering tasks shall go un-gineered. Code shall be un-coded. Systems un-administered. Processes? Unprocessed. And there's no way the underpaid IT staff at the local government admin is showing up when they could be building factories that build rockets to send space factories to other planets, each of which has its own unique challenges, and then also build factories there to make yet more rockets.
There is evidence to support my wild theory, of course. We already know that Factorio has many silicon valley tech tycoons under its spell—and at least one billionaire CEO lets employees at their company expense Factorio because of just how useful it is in developing a process-oriented, logistics-oriented, programming-forward mindset.
This is of course all because Factorio itself is an amazing, excellent videogame that spent most of a decade in development with dozens of features and optimizations that other games would salivate over. The Space Age expansion more than doubles the size of Factorio, and it's not just quantity, either: The new stuff you find on traveling to other words fundamentally upends how you play and enjoy this game.
That led critic Rick Lane to say that "Space Age is an immediate contender for the best expansion ever made" in the 92% PC Gamer review of Factorio: Space Age.
"Indeed, it’s tempting to describe Space Age as a sequel in all but name. Yet while there’s certainly a sequel’s worth of material in Space Age, this description does an injustice to how thoroughly and ingeniously it interweaves with the base game," he said.
That might sound like hyperbole, but after the time I've spent in the expansion I'd fully back that opinion up myself. It is, simply put, a very good videogame that is now, somehow, better.
You can find Factorio on its website and on GOG, Humble, and Steam, god help us all.