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$20 on Factorio is probably the best money I've ever spent on a game, having played over 1,000 hours. In other words, they've managed to make something endlessl

• Bartweiss 7y ago
  Although from an industry perspective, that's bad news because you're paying $0.50/hour for entertainment. And without room for a new campaign or a graphics upgrade, whoever wants to sell you your next 1,000 hour game still has to compete with Factorio. Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, and maybe Satisfactory have all done well, but each one contends with all the rest. Don't get me wrong, I love Factorio and I think it's a way more valuable achievement than any of the loot box games under debate. I also think it's a viable development model: Factorio was in the top 100 for 2018 Steam revenue, with a 20 person studio. It's just interesting that unlike other media, videogames have this order-of-magnitude variation in how much they compete with one another. (This ties into a much longer narrative about the decline of single-player campaigns. The beauty of e.g. Dragon Age is that you can make an engrossing game and build, not undermine, the market for your next one. But as the difficulty of development shifts towards hard-to-reuse things like character models, there's an increasingly strong incentive to emulate CoD and R6 and wring as much longevity as possible out of each iteration.)