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Ahead of today's 1.0 release of Shapez 2, its lead developer acknowledges that his first attempt to launch an answer to Factorio didn't go quite as smoothly as his second. The sequel has already secured thousands of overwhelmingly positive reviews during its 20 months in early access - but for the first Shapez, Springer admits that "everything that you should do" for a successful launch, "I ignored."
Unsurprisingly, Springer's journey to creating his own factory sim series started with Factorio. Annoyed by the hordes of insect enemies that plagued his carefully laid-out conveyor belts, however, he decided to build his own game. Planned out as a hobby project made solely in Springer's free time over just a few months, the game that would kickstart the Shapez series was initially made with "no commercial intent" whatsoever.
To release the project, Springer turned to indie platform Itch.io, where positive sentiment pushed it to a featured spot on the front page. Buoyed by that success, he considered publishing it on Steam as well, but Shapez wasn't "ready" for a full release yet. Early Access was the obvious solution, but that's where Tobias hit the series' first major roadblock: "I filled out the accreditation and everything, and then Steam rejected my store page around five times because they said 'we don't like the reason why you're going into Early Access'."
Any game releasing into Early Access on Steam has to justify that decision to both Valve and its players. When it came to Shapez, the company said that none of the four different descriptions Springer wrote about his development plans could "fully explain what a customer can expect from your app." Eventually, he got so annoyed by the process that in June 2020, he simply unchecked the Early Access box; "We're going to do full release, I don't care."
That gung-ho approach to release meant that Shapez had only 3,000 wishlists at launch, and little of the pre-launch background work to help it succeed. "Basically, everything that you should do, I ignored," Springer admits. Shapez was saved from relative obscurity by a streaming community that latched onto it, eventually driving more than a million sales. But even that didn't entirely pave the way for Shapez 2. Springer went back to freelance work, and even ran a Mexican restaurant for a while before he came across a funding project from the German government, "which basically allowed you to fund half of the development costs" of a new project.
With financial backing from the government and ideas about how to expand on the "very tight" gameplay loops of Shapez 1, Springer built up his team to 15 people, and after about two years of work, released Shapez 2 into Early Access in 2024. After the series' clumsy start on the platform, it's been a huge hit - 700,000 sales so far added to the original games' 1.3 million copies shipped to push Shapez beyond the two million mark, and Springer thinks that's likely to grow substantially with 1.0. While games like Satisfactory and Factorio might be the genre juggernauts, he argues that his team is extremely well-established in the factory sim genre by virtue of being "the only company that has shipped more than one factory game." An astonishing commitment to player feedback - the sequel's art style was chosen in a community vote - helped make Shapez 2 "the top-rated game in the genre" for a while as it sat at a 98% positive rating.
But there's a touch of irony to what is perhaps the biggest driver of Shapez 2's Early Access success: Springer's philosophy on what an Early Access launch should actually look like. "The game needs to be fully playable," he says, "it needs to be bug-free, it needs to have everything it's going to have." Too many players, he believes, are still wary of the Early Access label from the program's early days, when many projects were abandoned long before they were finished projects. Nowadays, he says, a game's fate "is 90%, 95% determined by the version of the game that you shipped the first time to the public." That's why "internally, we treat early access as 1.0," and why Shapez 2's upcoming 1.0 release could actually be considered its 2.0 version instead. For a series that was kickstarted by being thrust, somewhat unceremoniously, into the Steam ecosystem, such a dedicated approach to the Early Access ecosystem might seem unlikely, but even two million copies later, Springer remains quietly confident in his philosophy: "It's worked well, I think."
