Factorio explained before you start

Factorio is a game about building a factory, and it has a reputation for eating months. This page is for someone deciding, on 18 September 2026, whether to start it: what it is, what the first hours ask, what it costs today, which version you will be playing, the requirements, the ratings, and what we could not pin down. Every fact comes from a page in the Sources list read today, most of them Wube Software's own.

An early Factorio base at night: two columns of three stone furnaces glowing orange, fed by mechanical arms from a yellow transport belt running up the middle of the screen, with burner mining drills on patches of blue-grey ore at the top and orange-red ore at the right, wooden crates beside them, and the player character lit by a small lamp in the dark grass — The opening shape of the game: a few drills, a belt, and furnaces that stop when the coal runs out. Image: Wube Software press kit, provided for editorial use; fetched 2026-09-18.

Who makes it, and where it runs

Steam's entry for app 427520 names Wube Software LTD. as both developer and publisher. The studio's press kit puts the office in Prague, Czech Republic, and describes a team that grew from two programmers into "about 30 full time professionals and contributors from around the world", working in C++ on a custom engine. Its timeline runs from May 2012 through a Steam launch in February 2016 to version 1.0 in August 2020 and the Nintendo Switch release in October 2022.

Steam's release-date field says Aug 14, 2020, which is the 1.0 date rather than the day the game arrived there.

Where you buy it	Platforms on that listing	Date on that listing
Steam	Windows, macOS, Linux	14 August 2020
factorio.com website key	Windows 11 and 10, OS X 10.10 or newer, Linux tarball	none given
GOG	Windows, Linux, Mac OS X	25 February 2016 in the page data
Nintendo eShop	Nintendo Switch	28 October 2022
Nintendo eShop	Nintendo Switch 2	22 December 2025

Wube's FAQ lists those same systems and no others. No PlayStation or Xbox version appears anywhere we read today.

What you actually do

Steam's summary states the loop: "Factorio is a game about building and creating automated factories to produce items of increasing complexity, within an infinite 2D world. Use your imagination to design your factory, combine simple elements into ingenious structures, and finally protect it from the creatures who don't really like you."

Wube's content page lists what unlocks in roughly that order: drills and belts, furnaces and assembling machines, electricity from either "cheap steam, which makes tons of pollution" or "the expensive but eco-friendly solar panels", research, oil refining, trains, logistic robots, blueprints built for you by construction robots, and a circuit network the page calls a way to "program" the factory. The enemies are tied to that pollution: "this heavy exploitation of the planet's resources does not sit nicely with the locals".

It plays alone or with company: Steam lists online and LAN co-op, and the FAQ claims support for "up to 500 players in a single game". A free demo on Steam and on Wube's site teaches "the very basic game mechanics".

The steep part, in the developer's own words

The honest description of the first hours is Wube's own note to press: "Factorio is a slow paced game in the beginning. If you are making a first look / preview video please consider to play the game yourself for some time (couple of hours)." A developer asking reviewers for two hours before they judge it is a fair warning to a buyer too.

The far end is long. Friday Facts #440 describes an office playtest in which the team played through every planet of the expansion, on the harder deathworld setting, and "finished with a respectable time of 53 hours 15 minutes" — the people who wrote it, on a planned run. Steam's categories do include adjustable difficulty and save anytime, so some of the pace is yours.

A large Factorio factory by day: several long rows of assembling machines and chemical plants linked by mechanical arms, white and blue pipe runs curving between them, overhead power poles and wires, and trains standing at stations on rail lines to the right, all built on brown dirt and patches of grass — The other end of the same game: rows of machines fed by pipes and rail. Image: Wube Software press kit, provided for editorial use; fetched 2026-09-18.

What it costs, and what the money buys

Item	Storefront	Price on 18 September 2026
Factorio	Steam	$35.00 US, £30.00 UK, 32,--€ DE, discount zero
Factorio	GOG, US	$35.00, discount zero
Factorio	Nintendo eShop US, Switch	$35.00
Factorio - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition	Nintendo eShop US	$35.00
Factorio: Space Age	Steam	$35.00, £30.00, 32,--€
Factorio: Space Age, Switch 2 DLC	Nintendo eShop US	$35.00
Factorio Demo	Steam and factorio.com	free

The price is the unusual part, and the store says so itself. Steam's About text carries a "Discount Disclaimer: We don't have any plans to take part in a sale or to reduce the price for the foreseeable future." Asked whether it takes part in Steam sales or bundles, the FAQ answers "No. The price we ask is what we consider a fair price for the game." Both listings we read today show a discount of zero, though one day's reading is not a history.

What the payment covers is in the Terms of Service, which calls the purchase a membership: it "entitles you to all the updates to the digital content associated with this membership for free in the future", but not "any more significant products that we might release, such as a Factorio DLCs, Factorio 2, etc." The press kit compresses that into one line: "No DRM, pay once, get updates for free." A key bought on Wube's site adds DRM-free downloads, mod portal access, a 28-day refund guarantee and a redeemable Steam key. It is a different bargain from No Man's Sky, where the updates kept coming with nothing further to buy: here the expansion is the paid product.

The console side has its own rule. Announcing the Switch 2 version, Wube priced the upgrade for existing Switch owners at nothing: "The price for this upgrade will be... free. We don't believe paying for a technical upgrade is reasonable."

The expansion, and whether you need it

Factorio: Space Age is the one paid add-on that matters, and its press kit is precise: it "started development in 2021 and released on October 21st 2024 at the price of $35.00", which Steam's listing matches. It adds space platforms, "flying factories that act as the means of transportation between planets", four new planets, elevated rails, and a quality system for better versions of items and machines.

It is sequel-sized, and the reason to check hardware before buying on console: Wube states plainly that "The original Nintendo Switch did not have enough RAM and CPU power to run Space Age, 5 planets worth of bases was too much", which is why the DLC appears on the Switch 2 store only. On Steam today the expansion shows 6,848 reviews, 6,273 positive, summarised "Very Positive", against the base game's 234,756 reviews and 228,925 positive, "Overwhelmingly Positive", with a Metacritic score of 90 and 18,024 people in the game at 15:37 UTC.

A Factorio base on the frozen planet Aquilo: machines, heat pipes and insulated pipe runs laid out on grey platform flooring surrounded by snow and cracked ice, with orange heating towers, a large central machine on yellow-striped concrete, and turbines at the right — Aquilo, one of the four planets the expansion adds, as shown on Wube's Space Age content page. Image: Wube Software press kit, provided for editorial use; fetched 2026-09-18.

Which version you will be playing

Wube runs two branches, and today's download page shows both: stable 2.0.77, posted as stable on Steam on 23 June 2026, and experimental 2.1.19, which followed three days later. Friday Facts #444 set out what opting in means: 2.0 saves will load "but there may be changes that break your factory designs", saves and blueprints "cannot be downgraded to 2.0" once updated, and "Mods you rely on may not be updated yet."

The scope came a month earlier, in Friday Facts #440: quality of life, small features, fixes and modding improvements, with no new planets, no new enemies and no new research trees or resource chains. The same post framed it as the end of a road: "We envision 2.1 as our last major update of Factorio, and we will shift the focus onto long term support." Wube planned to leave 2.1 experimental across the summer so mod authors could catch up, and the download page says that is still where it sits. Work continues: today's Friday Facts #446 describes a new ARM64 Linux port aimed at Valve's Steam Frame. Buy now and you get the stable branch, which is what most mods are built for.

Running it

Steam's minimum asks for Windows 11 or 10, a quad core 3 GHz processor, 8 GB of RAM, a DirectX 11 GPU with 1 GB of VRAM at the level of a GeForce GTX 750 Ti, and 5 GB of storage; its recommended line asks for a quad core 4 GHz processor from 2020 or newer, 16 GB of RAM, 4 GB of VRAM at the level of a GTX 1050 Ti, and 10 GB.

Wube's own purchase page asks for less: 4 GB of RAM, a DirectX 10.1 GPU with 512 MB of VRAM, a dual core 3 GHz processor and 3 GB of disk. Neither page is dated, so treat the Steam numbers as the safer figure. Steam's report puts the game in its Verified tier for the Steam Deck with all four checks passing, and the FAQ offers a free Linux headless server. The Switch 2 version is a technical upgrade, not a content one: 1080p handheld instead of 720p, up to 2160p docked, faster loading, larger bases and a Joy-Con mouse mode.

Age ratings

Nintendo's US store shows an ESRB rating of Teen on both the Switch and Switch 2 listings, with the descriptors Blood and Violence and the interactive element Users Interact, the standard notice for player-to-player contact.

The boards' own databases are thinner. An ESRB title search for factorio returned zero ratings today, so we cannot link the certificate behind Nintendo's display. PEGI's search returned "Found 0 results from your query", which its note says may mean the game was never classified or was published on a platform outside the database. Steam shows other territories' ratings, and its data marks the German 12 and Indonesian 13 entries as generated by the store rather than issued by a board.

Before you start

Play the demo first. It is free on Steam and on Wube's site, and it exists so you can decide before paying.
Give it more than an evening. The developers' own complete run through the expansion took 53 hours 15 minutes, and they knew where everything was.
Do not wait for a sale. Wube's answer on sales and bundles is a flat no, and the Steam page repeats it as a disclaimer.
Buy the base game before the expansion, at $35.00 each in the US; on console, Space Age needs a Switch 2.
Stay on the stable branch. Once a save or blueprint has been opened in 2.1 it cannot go back to 2.0.

What we could not confirm

Which ESRB certificate sits behind Nintendo's Teen display, since the database returns nothing for this title, and whether PEGI has ever rated it. The date of the press kit's "more than 3,500,000 copies sold" figure, Wube's own number and undated on the page. When 2.1 will be marked stable, which Friday Facts #440 left open. And prices outside the United States on Nintendo and GOG.

The row in the dataset

The dataset records Factorio with Wube Software LTD. as both developer and publisher, a first release of 14 August 2020 from Steam's release-date field, the platforms Windows PC, macOS, Linux, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, the genre factory-building simulation, and the era current. That date is the 1.0 release, not the February 2016 Steam launch the press kit records.