The main Factorio dev is pretty publicly a shithead.
Perhaps even worse: Factorio has never gone on sale. They are very strongly against the idea of sales. Which like… Fine, but game value depreciates so you should at least drop the price over time. Not the case- in fact they INCREASED the price from $30 to $35 in 2023. The game came out in 2020. It’s now a 5 year old 2D indie game listed at $35. Can I afford that? Yes. Am I going to buy it? No.
The game came out in 2020. It’s now a 5 year old 2D indie game listed at $35
… which is still receiving updates well into 2025: https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/2.0.0. Probably, in part, because they never put the game on sale and so each and every purchase of the game by players contributes equally to the studio’s capacity to continue supporting the game.
I interpret their comment slightly differently; Factorio as a game is less valuable today then, say, 4 years ago.
I still disagree with that interpretation, as the game has continued to receive updates and bugfixes, steadily increasing it’s value (or at least counteracting the depreciation). Not to mention the additional value provided by community mods has only increased over the years.
The game is also one-of-a-kind. Until a “factorio 2” equivalent comes out that is just straight-up better in every way, it’s hard to see how the value would depreciate. Heck, the Space Age DLC is basically “Factorio 2” without splitting the playerbase across 2 separate games.
A couple of different controversies. He has posts on Reddit (that have since been deleted, but you can find them archived) talking about how student-teacher sexual relationships can often be consensual.
The more famous controversy is this one. Which is hard to summarize other than him being a general asshole to fans, and while he didn’t really say anything too terrible he uses a lot of red-flag language talking about “cancel culture” and “sjw’s” which, in my experience, is only used unirlnically by shitty people.
I’ve seen an online comment somewhere referring to this interview of him (it’s in Czech, but has English captions). I don’t have much interest in watching the full interview myself (though I probably should just to check what I’m talking about). According to this comment I had seen, he explains in this interview that he had that knee-jerk reaction to the pushback to recommending Bob Martin’s “Clean Code” book in the public factorio devlog in part because of the political climate he grew up in (Czechoslovakia near the end of the Soviet Union, and then following it’s dissolution) which was full of spurious accusations based on tangential links.
Myself, I distinctly remember reading the devblog post when it came out and thinking “oh boy, it’s a shame he only learned about Clean Code today and clearly is unaware of Bob Martin’s reputation on matters outside of strict software development”. His comments in the reddit thread really just made things worse. I’m still hesitant to unequivocally label him as bad as many others, but simultaneously I don’t hold much hope that he’ll ever come out and publicly denounce his former comments.
Sounds like a relatively normal dude. It’s foolish to care about “red-flag language”, especially if you’re also saying “he didn’t really say anything to terrible.”
The main Factorio dev is pretty publicly a shithead.
Perhaps even worse: Factorio has never gone on sale. They are very strongly against the idea of sales. Which like… Fine, but game value depreciates so you should at least drop the price over time. Not the case- in fact they INCREASED the price from $30 to $35 in 2023. The game came out in 2020. It’s now a 5 year old 2D indie game listed at $35. Can I afford that? Yes. Am I going to buy it? No.
… which is still receiving updates well into 2025: https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/2.0.0. Probably, in part, because they never put the game on sale and so each and every purchase of the game by players contributes equally to the studio’s capacity to continue supporting the game.
I’m also curious about how game value depreciates.
Games tend to go on sale to sell more copies later in their lifespan, attracting customers that weren’t going to pay the original price for it.
It sounds like you’re saying that the game can’t be played for as long if you buy it later, which doesn’t really make sense to me.
I might be a biased, as I’m one of those people with a few thousand hours into Factorio, and several hundred into other factory games.
I interpret their comment slightly differently; Factorio as a game is less valuable today then, say, 4 years ago.
I still disagree with that interpretation, as the game has continued to receive updates and bugfixes, steadily increasing it’s value (or at least counteracting the depreciation). Not to mention the additional value provided by community mods has only increased over the years.
The game is also one-of-a-kind. Until a “factorio 2” equivalent comes out that is just straight-up better in every way, it’s hard to see how the value would depreciate. Heck, the Space Age DLC is basically “Factorio 2” without splitting the playerbase across 2 separate games.
What do you mean that the dev is publicly a shithead? Genuinely curious because I’ve mostly only seen positive information about them
A couple of different controversies. He has posts on Reddit (that have since been deleted, but you can find them archived) talking about how student-teacher sexual relationships can often be consensual.
The more famous controversy is this one. Which is hard to summarize other than him being a general asshole to fans, and while he didn’t really say anything too terrible he uses a lot of red-flag language talking about “cancel culture” and “sjw’s” which, in my experience, is only used unirlnically by shitty people.
I’ve seen an online comment somewhere referring to this interview of him (it’s in Czech, but has English captions). I don’t have much interest in watching the full interview myself (though I probably should just to check what I’m talking about). According to this comment I had seen, he explains in this interview that he had that knee-jerk reaction to the pushback to recommending Bob Martin’s “Clean Code” book in the public factorio devlog in part because of the political climate he grew up in (Czechoslovakia near the end of the Soviet Union, and then following it’s dissolution) which was full of spurious accusations based on tangential links.
Myself, I distinctly remember reading the devblog post when it came out and thinking “oh boy, it’s a shame he only learned about Clean Code today and clearly is unaware of Bob Martin’s reputation on matters outside of strict software development”. His comments in the reddit thread really just made things worse. I’m still hesitant to unequivocally label him as bad as many others, but simultaneously I don’t hold much hope that he’ll ever come out and publicly denounce his former comments.
This really raises a lot of questions about Factorio’s story and worldbuilding 😔
Sounds like a relatively normal dude. It’s foolish to care about “red-flag language”, especially if you’re also saying “he didn’t really say anything to terrible.”
I suppose when you look at the world through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.
who cares?