I’m happy to see Satisfactory’s development come to a close, but I’ll miss the journey. Getting invested in an Early Access game doesn’t always turn out well. When you buy into a game in its earliest stages, there often isn’t much to do, and there’s no guarantee that the game will ever form into a shape even vaguely reminiscent of what the developers have promised. I’ve gotten burned more times than I can count by Early Access games that ended up in development hell or were abandoned not long after Early Access began.
Developers have said that they’re actually disincentives to continue working on games after the initial interest dies off, which is probably why studios like Palworld’s Pocketpair have multiple Early Access games ‘in development’, but only the newest one seems to be getting much attention. But for every ten Early Access sob stories, there’s one success that makes the whole journey worth it. Being there from the very beginning and watching a game evolve with every update until it finally launches 1.0 is incredibly satisfying, and I’ve been lucky enough to get in on the ground floor of some of Steam’s biggest Early Access hits. Subnautica, Slay the Spire, The Forest, and Raft all spent years in Early Access, offering many opportunities to pop in and check their progress as they slowly grew into phenomenal games.
Of all the games I’ve tracked through Early Access, Satisfactory is the one I’ve spent the most time with and waited the longest to see it reach the finish line. With the 1.0 launch on the horizon later this year, it’s bittersweet to know that the journey is coming to an end. I started playing Satisfactory all the way back in 2019 when it first hit the Epic Game Store, and I was immediately enamored by it. A first-person, 3D version of Factorio might not sound that appealing on paper, but the process of mining, building, and automating across a vast alien world is an experience unlike any other.
It scratches the same itch that survival games do, but it also tickles the part of my brain that loves RPGs and making numbers go up. Satisfactory has changed so much in the last six years, and I’ve loved jumping back in with each new major update to see all the new equipment and improvements. The most recent update at the end of last year brought the entire game into Unreal 5 – a massive undertaking for Coffee Stain Studios – and introduced some incredibly useful tools like the Power Tower for long distance power networking and priority power switches to help ensure parts of your grid stay up when the system gets overloaded. We may be coming to the end of big, exciting new features in Satisfactory, and while I’m happy to see the game finally launch, I’m also sad that the journey is almost over.
It’s worked pretty well for me all these years, and even if the updates slow down or stop, I don’t see myself moving on from Satisfactory anytime soon.
