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"

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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