Factorio's long-awaited Space Age DLC launches today, as does its 2.0 update, and the two releases together appear to have resulted in a massive player count spike for the factory-building sim.
The Space Age DLC was first announced all the way back in 2021, although it didn't have a name at that point. Details were drip-fed by developer Wube Software throughout the next couple of years, until Space Age was officially unveiled in August last year.
The DLC's release date, along with the date for Factorio's 2.0 update, was subsequently revealed in summer, and now that it's upon us, it looks like Factorio is about to go...well, into the stratosphere.
At time of writing, Factorio is sitting at a princely 55,694 players on Steam, which also happens to be the game's all-time player count peak, handily beating its previous best of 34,700 (which it achieved around the time of its 1.0 release).
Given that Space Age and the 2.0 update were only released today, that number may well increase in the coming hours and days; it had already jumped by a few thousand to its current total when I refreshed the page just a few minutes after initially...
