Wube Software have written up their plans for the future of Factorio and it sounds exciting, with it confirmed that they're looking to work on a big expansion.
Factorio is done, as in the recent 1.1 release is the "final release of the vanilla game" and so will only see standard maintenance patches for bug fixes and alike. The question is where do they take it from here? They went over options like free updates, a sequel and more but settled on doing a big expansion as they're not a fan of multiple smaller DLC.
What to expect from it? Too early to tell they say and they have no idea when it will be ready as work has only just begun. We're looking at likely more than a year.
I would happily pay for an expansion. Factorio is a properly great game and it deserves a long life, and I certainly would love to see even more crammed into an already very busy game.
The post also goes over plenty of stats, showing that Factorio has now sold over 2.5 million copies with over 38 thousand combined years of in-game time from players. That's absolutely insane to think about but not exactly surprising with Steam reviews showing individual players with thousands of hours.
As for jobs, they have a few positions going. Interestingly, on the coding side they mentioned that while they don't need programmers much right now they are lacking Linux/macOS specialists. So if you're strong with both it might be worthwhile reaching out to Wube Software.
The full post can be seen here.
You can buy a copy of Factorio from Humble Store, GOG and Steam.
I have 878 hours invested in it and I feel like there's at least just as much still left for the future (probably much more tho). It's easily one of my most favourite games ever.
It goes without saying that I'd be more than happy to pay for updates. I mean... considering how much time I've spent in this game for just 20€ (or something like that), it's almost as if it was free.
Personally I wouldn't mind multiple DLCs either. But yeah, bigger DLCs (or "exapnsions", same thing) would be more welcome and easier to handle. After all, we don't want to end up like CK2/EU4 which, even tho they had a bunch of free updates and most DLCs were actually good, they were simply too many and as a new potential customer it was VERY hard to get into those games after a while. (Which is why I never got into EU4, but still kept buying and enjoying CK2 DLCs all the way until it reached EoL).
I don't find DLCs to be evil, it's just that they are often abused and meaningless. But I trust that Wube will put out meaningful and important DLCs (/expansions).
Last edited by Hori on 8 February 2021 at 10:20 am UTC
And I'll take this opportunity to compliment the excellent mod integration in this game. Installing, updating, dependencies, conflicts, everything is handled in the game itself.
Not that I doubt them, like they'd be in the top 3 of studios I would instabuy stuff from if I was to ever do that again.
On the other end, it's one of those games I'm not even sure a End of Life would matter. The modding community is solid and has already some insane work put into it from both the studio (that pro-actively support the community) and the modders.
As long as it break nothing tho, I'll definitely dig an expansion
Last edited by MisterPaytwick on 8 February 2021 at 11:35 am UTC
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