If you want more sales...

[Voqar]

...get on Steam Early Access. You get a ton of exposure and there are tons of people who would love this game. Your game is plenty far along for EA - it's in better shape than many that go EA since it's entirely playable and enjoyable, if not addictive, and is only getting better. You guys do weekly communications and regular updates better than many devs also.

Plus for customers the game gets updated automatically and it's easier for you to update it too. There are those few people with sticks up their butts who hate Steam just to have something else on the web (and in life) to hate, and who want developers wasting time packaging updates all over the web, but they can get over it. This is my motivation for suggesting since I own lots of games, lots of EA games, and several alphas NOT (factorio, rimworld, timber & stone, cube world (which is nearly vapor, sadly) to name some) on Steam and checking up on the ones not on Steam is something I could do without - get on Steam!

In other news, I swear your sold copies counter jumped 1000+ in the past few days - coincidentally I and others have been suggesting to Quill18 on youtube that he try your game and do a video for it (the demo anyways - I'm pretty sure some devs give him copies to get exposure, like he had early access and did vids for AOW3 recently), and he finally did a Factorio video few days ago, and the comments from viewers were favorable with many saying it was a must purchase just from watching.

Having a solid demo surely helps regardless of where you try to get exposure, so continued kudos for that.

I'm telling ya - this game rocks - and more exposure simply from being on Steam and it would sell itself.

[Tami]

This game is allready in a Steam program

[kovarex]

Hello, we definitely aim to get to steam, no doubt about that. The only question is when.

As I wrote here: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-27

What we are still unsure about is when to try to hit the steam+bigger exposure button. I just read my post on the steam from half a year ago, where we stated, that when 0.6 is stable, we will get the trailer and we will apply for steam. Here we are waiting for the 0.9, the trailer almost finished, but still not sure whether we should really start the campaign now. When we start imagining the additions and polishing we have planned for the foreseeable future, the only rational thing that seems to be viable now is to wait for these. We still believe that we have just single shot for the first impression and if we shoot too early for it, we risk to hit our leg.

So the question is, if we have enough money to not struggle to pay the rent and other team members, why not wait with the exposure until we polish all the things?

[Reduced_Silver]

Well, my answer to Kovarex would be, what is the benefit of further polishing and gameplay feature implementation from its current (experimental) build state?

This game, in my opinion, is the most stable, feature rich, and engrossing experience I have encountered in recent memory.

Factorio's experimental builds, the only I play, has never crashed on me once, I have never experienced this kind of stability in software of any type, let alone an alpha.

It just slows down for the autosave.

Well, it's nice to know that things are going well financially, but I find it such a bizarre twist that this game is not on steam compared with other games in early access that I have experienced.

[slay_mithos]

The thing is that steam is overflowed by early access and old titles at this point, with so many things on sale every day that if it doesn't take off right away, it has all the chances to get buried for a long time.

Making sure that the game is close to release, or even released would give it a lot more value to buyers than all those sandbox games that are in the early access (most of them not really getting much updates).

I really like this approach on keeping it a low-ish profile (non-steam) while working on the game, ironing out the bugs, polishing the gameplay and balancing the recipes. It shows that they care more about the game and the players than about the potential burst of money, and that they know that there is more money to be made with a polished game than with an alpha.