I’m an avid Factorio player. It is rare to see such commitment to craftsmanship that the Factorio developers demonstrate. Every aspect of the game is continually refined and improved. The game is very performant even when there tens of thousands of entities moving around at any moment.
The multiplayer gameplay also reveals a lot of fundamental truths about collaborative engineering as the player must debate architecture, prioritize and balance between the short term and the long term, join individual efforts into a group product, discover Schelling points, and so on.
oh please stop... don't take something as joyous and wonderful as Factorio and try to make it about misery. I play games like Factorio to not worry about the world's problems for a few hours.
I haven't checked the dev's actual intentions, but I'd be surprised if the misery isn't an entirely intended theme of the game. That's why the factory causes pollution, which the insects attack, earning you the aptly named achievement "It stinks and they don't like it". You're f'ing up an ecosystem with an ever growing, and maddeningly wasteful [0], contraption. Your factory is an invasive cancer of metal and plastic.
[0] The overwhelming majority of what you make gets thrown into a blender and turned into Science Juice.
I tried fucking with Factorio and watching the green world get turned into a bare brown desert full of machines was immensely depressing. I sympathized with the bugs: destroy these machines, let the world stay pleasant. I think the misery is inherent in the game already.
Factorio was one of the rare few early access games I paid for because even at like .30 I thought "This is a full game (and stable) and they still want to do more?!" Also I like the minecraft model of never changing the price. It always feels like a good buy then because it isn't instantly devalued at the next steam sale.
The multiplayer gameplay also reveals a lot of fundamental truths about collaborative engineering as the player must debate architecture, prioritize and balance between the short term and the long term, join individual efforts into a group product, discover Schelling points, and so on.