Beware of survivor bias. Factorio is a great game built by skilled people with care and devotion, I'm not knocking it. But how many other great games, built by skilled people with care and devotion, didn't get the audience that Factorio did, for whatever reason?

There tends to be an automatic assumption that if you didn't succeed then you did something wrong, and that if you did succeed than you did it all right. These two things are less connected than that. There is "luck" involved here (in quotes because it's more complex than the phrase "I got lucky" implies).

To draw any kind of conclusion about whether Factorio was a success because of its execution as a gaming project, we would need to examine a range of other games, successful and unsuccessful, to see how well they executed and whether that caused a matching amount of success.

Factorio is more like a software library or framework - by programmers for programmers (but disguised as a game).

Seems like most Zachtronics games are like this too. I'll be deep into a puzzle and then I'll stop and realize I just basically spent an hour optimizing the critical path of a virtual program

> Factorio is a marvel of an example of a game made by people who are genuinely very skilled and care a lot about what they're making.

I'm have more admiration for the fact that they don't have sales. The only way to get a discount is to use a third party discount system like humble monthly.

Factorio also isn't over-priced to give something to cut sales from. It launched at a good price for the game and hasn't looked back.

Almost all indie devs don't have sale department (or people)

By "don't have sales" maushu meant the company doesn't run discounts on the game :)

This is a fun example of language differences. Here's English to Italian:

Sale (people selling stuff): "forza vendite"

sale (discount): "sconto"

Also, not related, but another interesting example:

"free" (open): "aperto"

"free" (price is zero): "gratuito", "gratis"

Doesn't mean that Italian is superior to English. Simply means that in certain languages, words are ambiguous where in others they are not.

They mean sales, like a 50% off discount, not a sales team.