Satisfactory's developers had no idea how popular its 1.0 launch was going to be: 'We try not to focus too much on that stuff and just make it as big as we possibly can'

I felt like I was late to the party when I started playing Satisfactory like mad in 2020, more than a year after the building game first released in early access on the Epic Games Store. Another four years later Satisfactory has finally arrived at its 1.0 release and proven just how off base I was. It peaked at close to 200,000 players the weekend after launch, more than four times its previous record. Apparently developer Coffee Stain was just as surprised as I was.

"I think I've finally gained my sleep cycle, but the last week has been insane," community manager Snutt Treptow said in an interview with PC Gamer. "I really thought once we dropped the game on release day, I'd be able to breathe, but no, it totally exploded, and we're super stoked. We broke all our records. I think our previous current player record was like 34,000 concurrent players. That weekend [after 1.0's launch] we got 186,000. Our YouTube channel had like 90,000 people watching the release stream concurrently. It's crazy."

Treptow said that the dev team "try not to focus too much" on forecasting how many people are likely to buy the game and were just focused on making the update as big and impactful as possible. But he credited the huge launch to a number of factors, including Satisfactory's six million sales during early access. That's a huge playerbase, but they didn't have any real sense of how many people in total were playing throughout early access and how many bought it months or years ago in anticipation of 1.0.

"It was an interesting period before 1.0, because we communicated in January that 1.0 was our next thing and we weren't going to update the game until then," he said. "I think a lot of people held off, because we noticed we got lower numbers on Twitch, people streaming the game, and we could see concurrent player counts dwindling. We weren't really worried about that, because we understood 'okay, people are saving themselves.' That's why we sent out the message that if you spend too much time in your save file, just be aware that things are gonna change.

"So I think a lot of people were waiting, and it may have played in our favor. Because then it becomes a bigger explosion of people playing and that in turn trickles down from word of mouth."

If you're one of Satisfactory's new players, good news: 1.0 doesn't mean the end of the road for the game. Coffee Stain is already working on plans for future updates.