It's not just that: Factorio makes it harder to games like Factorio to be profitable. The way we consume videogames is essentially unique among media, because

It's not just that: Factorio makes it harder to games like Factorio to be profitable. The way we consume videogames is essentially unique among media, because the time investment is so varied. Making a superhero movie helps saturate the market for superhero movies, but almost no one directly decides "instead of going to the rest of the MCU, I'll just rewatch Iron Man fifteen times". But with videogames, it's unremarkable to someone who loves two games give one 50 hours of playtime and the other 1,000. If you're going to enter the market, competing with that 1,000 hour title is a much tougher challenge. Factorio is like an an endless filet mignon; since it's not sold on graphics or story, that $20 purchase will endure to challenge all of its successors. (Satisfactory might catch on, but if it does the niche will be one step more exhausted.) Minecraft is a $30 game that's still eating play hours among people who've owned it for years; continuing monetization has depended not on a sequel but on ports (Pocket Edition), peripheral merch, and new generations of players; that's very obviously not a model most games can use. Dwarf Fortress is a niche of its own, near-permanently filled by just two donation-funded developers. (Dominions is less famous, but similar: a two-man team has kept people playing their output for twenty years.) Even AAA products like Civilization struggle; lots of people avoid buying Civ games at release because they compare unfavorably to the patched-and-expanded predecessor. Nor is it a coincidence that all of those games are immersive strategy or construction titles. On one hand, they're generally modest in terms of graphics and campaign, so there's no obvious need to switch to newer titles. And on the other, they're modest in graphics and server load, so a small team can make a popular title relatively cheaply. The end result is that you can make a solid profit on this sort of cheap, no-loot, no-subscribtion game - if you're one of an inherently small number of winners in a constrained design space. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. It's a triumph that $20, thousand-hour games exist, and the people making them actually do seem to make solid money. But it's worth remembering just how niche an arrangement this is. It's possible for media to exist that is at once desired and unprofitable to create; the Factorio equivalent for an FPS or CCG might well be such a product.