Exploring the rise of the factory sim genre – and what it says about automation in our own lives

By EDWIN EVANS-THIRLWELL

Mark Hofma, creative director on Satisfactory (left), from Skövde-based Coffee Stain Studios

A t first, it’s a single drill, rumbling away cheerfully in an alien world of sunny hills and wildflowers. Then, your first conveyor belt, carrying ore from mines to the smelter. The factory grows up around you slowly and unobtrusively: it’s easy to lose sight of the whole while you’re busy untangling bottlenecks and reorganising your production lines in order to create more advanced components. But after a while, you think to look up and around rather than down from your observation tower, and realise that, at some point, the factory has become everything you can see.

So go the opening hours of Satisfactory, one of the most successful members of an intricate species of management game that has quietly shot to popularity over the past few years. Ranging in scale from molecular reactors to extractors bigger than stars, factory sims are hypnotic celebrations of automation, allowing a single player to build up an industrial empire that can ultimately be left to operate itself. But it’s once again worth looking up, from the mesmerising loop and around yourself, and considering these games’ complicated relationship both with the social and environmental impacts of their real-life equivalents, and with videogames’ own tendency towards optimisation.

If the factory sim genre has a patient zero, that game is Wube Software’s Factorio, launched in 2016, which casts you as a stranded astronaut gradually industrialising an entire planet in order to build a rocket and escape. In essence, it’s Command & Conquer meets Elon Musk.

“Factorio was the main inspiration for our game,” acknowledges Mark Hofma, Satisfactory’s game director. “The team that started it thought, ‘This would be cool in 3D’.” But the genre’s roots extend a lot farther. Hofma points to Minecraft mods that automate the transferring of items to chests; other forebears include EA’s early Sim titles, the plottable unit behaviours of 4X games, and gold-farming bots in MMORPGs.

“A lot of games have automation, just not as their core gameplay focus,” Hofma points out, adding that “people inherently look for ways to make things easier for themselves, even if that is just in play.” When it comes to games, this impulse can be self-defeating. “A very common thing game designers say is that players will optimise their own fun away. You see it in a lot of games – if you give the players the tools to make a character immensely overpowered, they will do it, and ruin the game for themselves.” In some ways, the secret to factory simulations is that they offer a perverse solution to this. The goal is precisely to automate things to the point that you no longer need to interact with the game, which then effectively becomes an “idle sim”. At least, it does until a newly researched component or commodity obliges you to rebuild the whole factory from scratch.

Hofma says that the ongoing pressure to rebuild and re-optimise is the “main drop-off reason” for new Satisfactory players – to some, it just feels like perpetually reinventing the wheel. To others, that nagging awareness that a line isn’t performing as well as it should only doubles the joy of seeing the entire factory in motion.