How many copies did Factorio sell? Sales and Steam players
Factorio had sold about 4 million copies by September 2024, and its Space Age expansion sold more than 400,000 at launch.
Factorio had sold about 4 million copies by September 2024, the Financial Times reported. Its Space Age expansion followed on 21 October 2024, selling more than 400,000 copies in its first days and pulling 118,166 players onto Steam at once, the game’s biggest crowd yet, GamingOnLinux reported.
Factorio is a top-down industry simulation game where you play a crash-landed engineer who uses a planet’s resources to build a rocket. Its intricate design can keep players busy for weeks, so let’s look at Factorio in numbers, from total sales to hours watched on Twitch.
Factorio key statistics
- About 4 million copies sold by September 2024.
- 400,000+ copies of the Space Age expansion sold within days of its 21 October 2024 launch.
- 118,166 players at once on Steam in October 2024, its record.
- 3.5 million copies sold by Christmas 2022, at about 500,000 a year.
- 40,000+ Nintendo Switch copies sold by December 2022.
Factorio sales
Factorio sales have passed 4 million copies
- Sales passed 3.5 million at Christmas 2022, the developers wrote on the Factorio blog, with steady sales of about 500,000 copies a year.
- The game came to the Nintendo Switch in October 2022, and sold more than 40,000 copies there by the end of that year.
- Close to 40% of those Switch sales were in Japan.
- Factorio had sold 1 million copies by May 2017, while still in early access, the Factorio blog shows.
| When | Copies sold |
|---|---|
| May 2017 | 1 million |
| Christmas 2022 | 3.5 million |
| September 2024 | about 4 million |
| October 2024 | Space Age: more than 400,000 |
Factorio has never been discounted, a policy the developers said those steady sales proved right. It’s one of the best industry sims on the market, and the numbers keep climbing years after its 2016 Steam launch.
Factorio players
Factorio set its Steam record of 118,166 players at once in October 2024
| Year | Most players at once on Steam | Month |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 16,170 | March |
| 2017 | 20,133 | April |
| 2018 | 16,209 | April |
| 2019 | 22,317 | March |
| 2020 | 34,640 | August |
| 2021 | 22,392 | February |
| 2022 | 20,148 | December |
| 2023 | 22,854 | October |
| 2024 | 118,166 | October |
| 2025 | 42,583 | January |
| 2026 (to 30 October) | 31,246 | January |
Figures from Steam Charts. The August 2020 peak came with version 1.0, and the October 2024 record with Space Age.
Is Factorio dying? No. The Steam record came eight years after the game reached Steam, and 2026 peaks are still above 31,000, higher than any year before the expansion. Once you start, it’s hard to stop.
Factorio and G2A
G2A paid the Factorio developers $39,600 over stolen game keys
- In 2019, G2A promised to pay developers ten times what they lost on chargebacks if they could prove stolen keys had been sold on its marketplace.
- Wube Software, the developer of Factorio, was the only studio to take it up on the offer.
- An investigation confirmed that 198 of 321 keys bought with stolen credit cards had been sold on G2A between March and June 2016.
- In May 2020, G2A agreed to pay Wube $39,600, ten times the value of those 198 keys, Game Developer reported.
This is some drama we weren’t expecting for a game like Factorio. The developers are very protective of their game, as they have every right to be, so they took G2A up on its “limited-time” offer to get some money back.
Factorio on Twitch
Factorio had 5.1 million hours watched on Twitch in 2022
- The game had 239,180 hours broadcast in 2022.
- There were 588 viewers watching on average, across 27 channels on average, a viewer ratio of 21.5.
- Its biggest audience was 69,443 viewers at once.
- 14,664 broadcasters streamed the game that year.
Figures from SullyGnome. Even years after release, Factorio has not fallen out of relevance, because there is so much to build and it is very watchable.