we have just one expandable landing pad per planet.
It's nice to know that throughput isn't capped by the landing pad. When they first announced there could only be one, a lot of people had concerns about max SPM.
It kind of is capped by it, but the cap is huge, nothing to worry about.
Hello,
we usually show finished stuff in Friday facts these days, but I personally always liked to have a peek behind the curtains and see the (temporary) mess there.
This motivated me to do some kind of overview of how the overall expansion development felt from my perspective.
If you are like me, you might appreciate it.
Our story starts in February 2021 with ...
Read moreExcept that corporate profit margins surged during the pandemic, not nominal profits. That means profits became larger than they should have been proportional to revenue, which doesn't happen with inflation caused purely by an increase in the supply of money.
The articles I linked, which you clearly didn't read, explain this.
Also, no, that has nothing to do with anything I'm saying. You're the only one with a vested interest in pushing a "capitalists did nothing wrong, it was all the government's fault" narrative. You're the one that brought this up.
Edit: I can't anymore with this, this is such a waste of time.
Yes, I know the articles stated that profits went higher, and if the wages didn't go up appropriatelly, than yes, people working for these corporations had wages effectivelly shrinked. But it is a different subject, which doesn't actually explain that corporate greed would cause inflation. It would just affect that these corporations take advantage of it to improve margins.
Getting tired, that is a good sign. We are revealing the errors in the assimuptions you have. These assumptions are creating your worldview, and you are getting tired, because your brain defensive mechanism is kicking on, trying to avoid changing the worldview as much as possible.
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
So, if I demanipulate a single person it would be worth it.
Read moreAre you trolling? I would say we are more consumer friendly than about 99.9% of other companies.
But your pricing model isn't. The entire rest of the industry allows their games to depreciate with inflation, and you're saying you won't do that. That is a less consumer-friendly pricing strategy.
And you're deluding yourself if you think you're the only consumer friendly studio out there, especially among projects of this caliber. I can think of several other projects off the top of my head that have no microtransactions, have put out years of large, free updates, and have never increased their prices. Two of which are your largest competitors, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program.
After we put more than year of work working 14 hours a day 7 days a week for free.
It wasn't "for free," it was for the product you were planning to sell, which you did end up selling many year...
Let me focus on the most fact based thing to debunk, because somehow I smell this motivates you towards all of this:
Just search "money printing in the us during pandemic". So they apparently printed 27% extra money. And soon after that, there was a surge inflation, what a conicidence.
Yes, I understand there is a big motivation to blame the corporations, and coin terms like greedflation, to somehow achieve that so many people get confused and blame anyone but the real villain.
Read moreI have no idea how you can say "greedy" is a subjective term, acknowledge that you're adopting a less consumer-friendly pricing strategy than everyone else for no other reason than that you feel you can, and then turn around and say people are "generally incorrect" for seeing that pricing strategy as greedy.
Beyond that, a lot of what you're saying is simply wrong.
You have the investment cost, the risk of the investment (the bigger risk the bigger rewards often)
Factorio was crowdfunded, and you sold early access through almost the entire development process. Compared to the vast majority of game projects your investment and risk were both extremely low.
The labor wasn't done, the game is being worked on.
The vast majority of your work since 1.1 (which as I've pointed out was two full years before the price increase) has gone toward Space Age, which is a new product you plan to sell. So n...
"Acknowledge that you're adopting a less consumer-friendly pricing strategy than everyone else"
Are you trolling? I would say we are more consumer friendly than about 99.9% of other companies.
"Factorio was crowdfunded, and you sold early access through almost the entire development process. Compared to the vast majority of game projects your investment and risk were both extremely low."
Wrong. After we put more than year of work working 14 hours a day 7 days a week for free. This, lets say a million dollars worth invested. It is many times more than the money we got in the campaign and could go all into nothing. So the risk was already there. And after the campaign, we invested all of the money to keep going while barely getting along for another year at least, so even more risk, extremly big risk, when you think about how many games are released, and how many don't make anything.
"The vast majority of your work since 1.1 (which as I've pointed out ...
Read moreRead moreNo, I'm not confused about what inflation is. That's a fairly condescending suggestion.
Increasing game prices to match inflation simply isn't done, not even by reasonably priced, high-quality games with no microtransactions and free ongoing updates, and you're saying you feel you should be entitled to do it despite your studio not having any need to.
I don't know what you call that if not greedy. And Valve already adjusts their regional pricing recommendations every year based on consumer price indices and purchasing power, so you ended up hitting a bunch of regions twice for the same inflation.
I don't see any reason why games should automatically get cheaper with time
I do: you paid for the labor to make the game when inflation was lower, and distributing it to new consumers costs you next to nothing. So why should the price track with inflation?
If you'd waited until Space Age's release, which will actually add ...
"Increasing game prices to match inflation simply isn't done."
And what? Do you think that only things that are done already should be done? You should learn to stop using this kind of argument, because it is invalid. Regarding the adjustment, I think that everyone should do it because it makes sense, I hope that other game studios will follow.
"you paid for the labor to make the game when inflation was lower, and distributing it to new consumers costs you next to nothing. So why should the price track with inflation?"
There are 4 errors in this statement, let me explain:
1) The cost of labor has very little to do with cost of the product. You have the investment cost, the risk of the investment (the bigger risk the bigger rewards often), and also the the demand for the product.
2) The labor wasn't done, the game is being worked on. Which, by your logic, should mean it gets more and more expensive every year, even without the inflation.
... Read more
Hello,
Grab your best lube, because it's time to talk about fluids!
It is no secret that Factorio's fluid system is unpredictable, unintuitive, and at times, frustrating. Pipe throughput decreases over distance at an inconsistent rate, so the only way to reliably know how much fluid you can push through a pipe is to reference a table on the wiki. Furthermore, the throughput can vary depending on the order that the pipes were built. It is not a fun system to play with.
There have been m...
Read moreRead moreWhat's baffling to me is the idea that you guys should be exempt from the very predictable blowback from increasing the price of your game for no other reason than to keep with inflation while:
- The game had not had a major update in more than two years
- Your sales figures remained strong, and you'd just launched on a new platform
- You were actively working on an expansion with the same price point as the base game
I'm sorry, but this is something lots of people would see as greedy, and they're welcome to that opinion.
It's also baffling to me that most of the comments are defending you as pro-consumer while you're in here trying to paint "rent goes up every year, we should be able to do that too" as a noble cause, as if people are totally cool with getting gouged by their landlord every year.
I don't even have a problem with the price increase, but come on. In no un...
Based on the way you comment, I believe you are confused about the inflation.
We didn't increase the real price, we just adjusted for inflation, the price in real value was kept more or less the same. As inflation is still strong, I believe that in some time increase from 35 to 40 dollars will be necesary, again not our fault.
We are not in any way responsible for the fact that the goverments are printing a lot of money and decreasing the value of the existing money by that. If you have problem with that, talk to your goverment and try to change it. If your country, whatever it is, didn't have any inflation, the price could be kept the same in that country, and rents and price of everything wouldn't have to go up. Inflation is basically a multiplier to all prices, and it is a norm that it is automatically included in long term contracts.
I don't see any reason why games should automatically get cheaper with time, and even if someone decides to make their gam...
Read moreFor it to be a reasonable argument to me personally one would need to explain why the devs nowadays deserve to be compensated less for the game than they did when it launched in 2018.
100% disagree, and frankly this take is baffling to me. Every game ever released is affected by inflation, but Wube are the only devs I've ever seen react to that by increasing the price of their existing product. Most devs just create and sell new content, which I don't think anyone has a problem with.
What is baffling you? I personally prefer fewer quality games supported for a long time rather than small sh*tty releases over and over. Also, games are getting cheaper and cheaper every year due to inflation, which is not a good thing. Again, as a consumer I perfer less more expensive games compared to a lot of cheap games, or more likely to microtransaction driven games, which are automatically corrected for inflaction.
This is why I believe that someone should make a first step and work towards this being the norm. When I pay rent, I get a letter every year that my rent was increased by X % due to inflation, and basically everything is getting more expensive, why would game devs should stay behind?
Hello,
While a lot of time of 2.0 development has been spent on new features and quality of life,
we still take care of the smaller details and technical improvements.
Recently a desync bug was reported to us involving the modding API and multiple Windows and Linux computers that the player was using. My first instinct was to blame the mod developer for doing something wrong but I've seen enough bug reports over the years to know dismissing one without first investigating is a bad idea and a great way to eat crow.
... Read moreOk, I remember the process with modules quite clearly. In the very old days, I just added modules as a pet project to add more variability to the game, and instantly started to play with that.
In this version, you had beacons and module slots, and all modules could go anywhere.
It very quickly got to the point, where the best and only setups was 12 beacons with productivity modules around an assambler, to maximize the productivity as much as possible (because of the exponential aspect of it with the length of production chain).
It was clear, that it would affect the game too much this way, so we made the first limitation of productivity modules not going into beacons.
We played again, it was better, but in some cases, it was just weird, for example, we had this recipe where you made rocket, and another recipe, which had rocket + some extra explosives as an input to make the explosive rocket. Basically an upgrade recipe. But suddenly, with the product...
Read more
devtrackers.gg
if (moveRightActive && moveUpActive)
return Direction::NorthEast;
if (moveRightActive && moveDownActive)
return Direction::SouthEast;
if (moveLeftActive && moveDownActive)
return Direction::SouthWest;
if (moveLeftActive && moveUpActive)
return Direction::NorthWest;
if (moveUpActive)
return Direction::North;
if (moveRightActive)
return Direction::East;
if (moveDownActive)
return Direction::South;
if (moveLeftActive)
return Direction::West;
return Direction::None;
Hm. If item transformation is indeed evaluated lazily, this might result in an interesting corner case with mods:
- item1 should be turned to item2, which is also spoilable. For consistency the "overflow" time should be applied to item2;
- which might trigger it spoiling as well, turning it into (also spoilable) item3, etc.
This can result in significant hiccup, especially with short spoilage time and a loop in transformations, unless such spoilage loops are detected at initialization time, so that process can use module over total loop time to save repeated iterations.
Item transformation is evaluated instantly, but it is cheap, as it is basically once per item stack.
What does happen when the inventory is full with non-spoiled items and a spoil event occurs?
Like I have a chest filled with coal, and 1 stack with apples.
What will happen with the spoils? Will they get deleted? Chest will have additional slot?
The stack of apples becomes a stack of spoilage, the chest being full or not seems to be irelevant to me.
What is the freshness value of a normal non-perishable item? Does it remember the freshness it was made with?
No, once it gets out of the spoilable area, it is all the same. And when you recycle it, it gets 100% freshness no matter you made it from.
Cheap, even with the need to re-average a spoilable item stack every time an inserter/robot drops another item into the chest?
Or, I guess maybe a stack's new spoil rating only get calculated when it's needed?
It is a small extra operation in the process of merging two item stacks, it is completely negligable.
Read moreWhich damaged items average in 1.1?
In 1.1 buildings remember their damage, while ammo/science just merge, losing final item.
Is this a change for 2.0?
You made me unsure, so I just double checked in 1.1, and damaged items average indeed. Try to make 75% damaged belt and 25% damaged belt, mine them into the inventory, viola, you have 50% damaged belts X 2