You would think that after more than five years in early access, everyone who wanted to play Satisfactory would've gotten around to it at one point or another, and the 1.0 release would be, you know, nice but not essential. Or at least I would think that—and then I would have to admit that I was completely wrong about the whole thing.

The 1.0 release of Satisfactory has seen the game's concurrent player count on Steam rocket past 100,000—the first time it's ever even come close to that mark. (The previous peak, according to Steam Charts, was 34,238, still a damned respectable figure for such a niche game.) 

And it's not just veteran Satisfactorians wandering back in to see what's new: Satisfactory has also climbed into the top 10 on Steam's top sellers list. That's a whole lot of new Satisfactorios on the scene.

It's an impressive high note for a game that's already done very well for itself, for a very long time. Satisfactory launched into early access in March 2019 on the Epic Games Store, where it sold more than 500,000 copies in less than three months, making it one of the few Epic exclusives to actually make money. 

It made the move to Steam just over a year later, where it continued to evolve and expand: When the 1.0 release date was announced in July, our resident Satisfactician Wes Fenlon called it “the best building/automation game on PC,” and that was before the release of the final, “it's finished” 1.0 update.

The 1.0 version of Satisfactory is definitely not just a bit of tweaks and tuning on the way out the door. Wes laid out a full list of what's new in 1.0 and it's awfully long, encompassing everything from performance improvements and optimizations to quality of life features, player customization, new fuel types, and whatever Somersloops and Mercer Spheres are. “The short version is there's way more to do in Satisfactory than there was in the beginning,” he wrote, and right now there's way more people doing it, too.