I felt like I was late to the party when I started playing Satisfactory like mad in 2020, more than a year after the building game first released in early access on the Epic Games Store. Another four years later Satisfactory has finally arrived at its 1.0 release and proven just how off base I was. It peaked at close to 200,000 players the weekend after launch, more than four times its previous record. Apparently developer Coffee Stain was just as surprised as I was.
"I think I've finally gained my sleep cycle, but the last week has been insane," community manager Snutt Treptow said in an interview with PC Gamer. "I really thought once we dropped the game on release day, I'd be able to breathe, but no, it totally exploded, and we're super stoked. We broke all our records. I think our previous current player record was like 34,000 concurrent players. That weekend [after 1.0's launch] we got 186,000. Our YouTube channel had like 90,000 people watching the release stream concurrently. It's crazy."
