Legendary factory base builder Satisfactory flies past 186K peak Steam players after leaving early access: "Before this week our highest CCU on Steam was 34K"

Key art for Satisfactory, showing someone in an alien world overlooking a thriving factory.
(Image credit: Coffee Stain Studios)

Open-world factory base builder Satisfactory has seen an enormous surge in popularity since its 1.0 launch, and now boasts a concurrent player count record that's over five times larger than its early access peak.

Coffee Stain Studios' Satisfactory first launched in early access back in 2019, and last week, over five years later, its 1.0 version rolled out to immediate success. As well as scoring an impressive user score of 9.1 on Metacritic, there's also been a massive and steady uptick in players.

"Before this week our highest CCU [concurrent users] on Steam was 34K," the official Satisfactory Twitter account writes, sharing a graph of current players yesterday. "I can't tell you how crazy this is to me. Thank you everyone!"

When the devs celebrated this, Satisfactory had hit a peak of 168,821, but just hours later, the factory sim managed to surpass this to reach even greater heights. Now, its all-time concurrent player record is an impressive 186,158 according to SteamDB data, and with almost 114,000 players in the game at the time of writing, it doesn't look like its popularity is going to drop any time soon. 

We've entered quite a busy time for the factory management sim fans of the world. On the heels of Satisfactory's 1.0 launch, there's also Factorio's Space Age expansion releasing in five weeks on October 21. For those with the stamina to play both games, there are a few weeks to solely focus on Satisfactory, but one way or another, this duo of games seems determined to soak up a lot of free time in the months ahead.

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Catherine Lewis
News Writer

I'm one of GamesRadar+'s news writers, who works alongside the rest of the news team to deliver cool gaming stories that we love. After spending more hours than I can count filling The University of Sheffield's student newspaper with Pokemon and indie game content, and picking up a degree in Journalism Studies, I started my career at GAMINGbible where I worked as a journalist for over a year and a half. I then became TechRadar Gaming's news writer, where I sourced stories and wrote about all sorts of intriguing topics. In my spare time, you're sure to find me on my Nintendo Switch or PS5 playing through story-driven RPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles and Persona 5 Royal, nuzlocking old Pokemon games, or going for a Victory Royale in Fortnite.