Satisfactory’s developers didn’t know how popular the 1.0 launch would be. 'We don’t focus too much on it and just make as big as we can'

I felt like I had been late to the party in 2020 when I started playing Satisfactory with a passion, more than a full year after the game was first released as early access in the Epic Games Store. Satisfactory finally reached its 1.0 release four years after I first played it. It has proven that I was wrong. It reached a peak of close to 200,000 users the weekend following its launch, which is more than four-times its previous record. Coffee Stain, the developer, was as surprised as I am.

In an interview with PC Gamer, community manager Snutt Troeptow said: "I think that I've finally regained my sleep cycle. But the last week has just been insane." "I thought I would be able breathe once we released the game on launch day, but it exploded and we are super stoked. We broke all of our records. I think the previous record for concurrent players was about 34,000. We had 186,000 players that weekend [after the launch of 1.0]. On our YouTube channel, 90,000 people were watching the release stream simultaneously. It's crazy."

Treptow said the dev team "tries not to focus too heavily" on forecasting the number of people who are likely to purchase the game, and were only focused on making the upgrade as big and impactfulas possible. He attributed the massive launch to several factors, including Satisfactory’s six million early access sales. This is a large playerbase, but the developers didn't know how many people played during early access or how many bought the game months or years before 1.0.

"It was a period of interesting before 1.0 because we announced in January that we would not update the game until 1.0. "I think that a lot people held off because we noticed lower numbers on Twitch and people streaming the game. We could also see concurrent player counts dwindling. We didn't worry about it because we knew that people were saving themselves. We sent out a message saying that if you spend a lot of time in your save files, things will change.

"I think that a lot of people waited, and it could have worked in our favor." Then it's a bigger explosion and word of mouth spreads the news.

Good news for new Satisfactory players: 1.0 is not the end of the road. Coffee Stain has already begun planning for future updates.