If anything was going to throw a wrench into Factorio‘s meticulously manufactured mechanisms, you’d never think it was a punk’d up cyborg in a leather jacket. Yet, even as they powered full-steam towards release, the folks at Wube Software have decided Cyberpunk 2077‘s launch-day noise risks drowning out their contraptions. This week, the developers announced plans to bring Factorio out of early access five weeks early, releasing instead on Friday, August 14th.
Industrial sandbox Factorio was originally scheduled to release on September 25th this year. Unfortunately for them, a titan was about to inadvertently step all over their launch plans. See, in January, CD Projekt revealed that their brutally massive hack ’em up Cyberpunk 2077 had been delayed from April into September – a week before Factorio’s release.
Now, I personally can’t think of two games less likely to salvage each other’s audience. Thing is, CD Projekt’s neon behemoth is almost certainly going to suck all the air out of the room, both in audience attention and media coverage. Wube feel that “any release close to such a monumental game is going to feel some negative effects”.
While they could have easily pushed the release back a bit, Wube instead opted to bring Factorio’s launch forwards 5 weeks. Part of that is in earlier decisions to scale down their 1.0 expectations – canning a new campaign and postponing fluid improvements for a later date. Wube do want to make it clear that these were features already on the cutting room floor – nothing was removed because of Cyberpunk’s new release date.
“The general feeling in the office is that the game is pretty much done, and that we want to get it released as soon as possible. The sooner we get some closure on version 1.0, the sooner we can start thinking about fun and exciting new things.
“So due to the co-incidence of cancelling several major features, we can afford to bring the release date forward. To be clear, we didn’t cancel or postpone any features due to the Cyberpunk release date.”
Their original date also came with a good amount of wiggle room, a few weeks to buffer any potential hurdles or delays. But with the pace the team’s been keeping, they’re pretty confident they can get Factorio out the door-io on Steam by August 14th.