Satisfactory, a game about building factories, has sold 507,374 copies according to developer Coffee Stain Studios' programmer and community manager Jace Varlet. In a video blog released today, Varlet set the record straight after weeks of jokingly implying that Satisfactory was selling poorly—presumably to push back on the idea that being an Epic Games Store exclusive would doom Satisfactory.
"This is our best launch ever for Coffee Stain," Varlet says. "This is just super cool. It has exceeded all of our expectations. It's just amazing."
Satisfactory was first announced at the PC Gaming Show last year but stirred controversy, along with a lot of other indie developers, when it signed up to be an Epic Games Store exclusive. When it launched into early access back in March, there was no telling how well Satisfactory was selling, and Varlet played into that with a series of tweets from Satisfactory's official Twitter account that said the game had only sold around a dozen copies.
The truth, then, is quite different. With 500,000 copies sold in just under three months, Satisfactory is an undeniable hit. The Epic Games Store megasale, which turned out to be kind of a disaster, probably helped Coffee Stain reached that milestone, but Varlet says that, given Satisfactory's niche genre, no one on the team knew whether or not the game would ultimately be successful.
This information is valuable because, until now, few developers of Epic Games Store exclusive games have provided exact numbers for how well their games have sold. One of the first (and most controversial) Epic Games Store exclusives was Metro Exodus but its publisher, THQ Nordic, refused to comment on how well it sold on PC. Epic Games itself said that Metro Exodus sold 2.5 times better than Last Light did on Steam, but that comparison is flawed for a number of reasons.
But Satisfactory is at least proof that Epic Games Store exclusives are not doome, even if they're niche indie games. Though the storefront has a long way to go before it'll compete with Steam, that doesn't appear to be stopping people from buying games on it.
