Factorio's no-discount bet: Wube sold 3.5M+ copies and hit Steam's top charts

Factorio is a construction-and-management simulation game where players automate mining, logistics and production on an alien planet. It was created by Czech developers Michal Kovařík and Tomáš Kozelek, who started working on it in 2012 and released it on Steam Early Access in 2016 under their studio Wube Software.

The studio's defining bet was a pricing policy almost unheard of on Steam: the game would never go on sale. From launch it held the line through price increases — €20, then €30, then about €32 — and grew instead through continuous updates, a mod ecosystem and word of mouth, while most Steam games rely on frequent discount events.

The policy delivered steady numbers: sales ran at roughly 500,000 copies a year and passed 3.5 million by Christmas 2022, which the developers credited in their Friday Facts year-end post to the no-sale policy they had kept since 2016. At the €30 price that dominated the game's life, 3.5M copies imply around 2.5B CZK (about €100M) in gross revenue before Steam's ~one-third cut.

In October 2024 Wube released the Space Age expansion; base game and expansion traded the top spots on Steam's global paid bestseller chart with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, hit a record ~91,000 concurrent players, and earned 98% positive reviews among ~2,400 ratings — with the game still never discounted.