Everything begins somewhere and while automation gaming didn't start with Factorio it's the game that gave the genre its biggest boost. Factorio inspired Satisfactory, and Satisfactory became the kind of hit that turns a healthy niche into a thriving genre. "Automation" is such a broad term that there's no one way to do it right, in the same way that "FPS" can be applied to everything from Doom to Thief to Portal, and much more beyond that. A flat-plane, overhead view game like Shapez 2 plays very differently from a first-person builder like Foundry, while others like Omega Crafter or Nova Lands dispense with conveyor belts entirely in favor of drones, bots, and other helpers. So long as there's a way to take a handful of nothing and turn it into a massively interconnected system of production, it counts as an automation game.
Just A Few Thousand Hours More and the Automation Will Be Perfect
Steam's new Automation Fest started today and runs for a week, and these fests are becoming major events for within their genres as evidenced by the sheer number of new releases and updates all taking place today. There's far more than would be...
