I like the story from the announcement[1]. > We have a long history of trying to bring Factorio to other platforms, including consoles and mobile phones (not i

I like the story from the announcement[1]. > We have a long history of trying to bring Factorio to other platforms, including consoles and mobile phones (not including April Fools). We even worked with some external companies, but the projects never even got to the point where they would run technically, let alone the complicated part of making the game playable using controllers or touch screen. > We had some history of starting Factorio-related sub-projects that ended up in development hell for years This reminds me of their post on good foundations[2]. It sounds like they discovered the pain of growing tech debt and paralysis due to an aging stack, and the lack of results when you throw money at the problem (in other words, contract work to some external entity). What's also interesting is that this work ended up being a one-person project. It's just too hard to make progress fast when you add people to a project: people don't agree, they need to communicate not to overlap or to understand the changes added by others, this all slow things down. And if the stack is complicated, this can really put a stop to productivity. I think there's a real case for having one-person teams for the first X months on a new project. As long as the one person understands how they can later scale themselves. (This usually requires documentation, good architecture, good delegation, etc.) [1]: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-370 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-370 [2]: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-366 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-366