Did you know it was made with Allegro 5 (last I checked)?

That's a nice one. I may put it two bucks for playing along with my mother's husband.
It's the kind of game we love to play while drinking and talking ^^

That looks amazing. Put a "Made with Allegro" screen in the loading section and popularity of Allegro would grow exponentially.

Factorio got a mention in the release list for this week's Co-optional Podcast: https://youtu.be/UbN8098tg7U?t=2h33m12s
TotalBiscuit showed an interest in playing it, would be cool if there was a WTF Is Factorio that came out. Yay for Allegro and AGUI being used for something successful

It's actually pretty simple. You have X/Y/Z resources that have to be mined. They have to be mined, then put onto conveyer belts, and then assembled into pieces. And then those pieces get assembled into other pieces. And it just gets crazier and crazier combinations where you have to strip mine huge fields to supply the materials.

But overall, you're just feeding machines, noticing bottlenecks and replacing those sections.

It's really fun growing from a tiny operation to a huge industrial machine but you end up screwed by your initial designs.

I showed my 62-year old engineer Dad the game last night. He never plays games and he went "That... that looks amazing."

There is also alien wildlife that will get mad if you pollute too much and begin attacking you. But you can play without wildlife and just mine stuff, and as they stand right now, they're kind of boring.

Factorio REALLY needs to model their alien-life after Zerg + Dune. So you have monsters spreading creep VS your industrial "creeping" and there's an actual benefit to putting down concrete (keeping worms from crashing through your foundatations!). (Note: None of this paragraph is in the game.)

[edit]

We should play a game together some time!

I've already put 34 hours into it.

Well I never, as of now factorio is on the front page of
https://news.ycombinator.com/

There is a demo on their website.

Thanks.

I don't know ANYONE of significant numbers who would buy a game they like and then refund it. People naturally collect things. I've got 150-200 games in my Steam library I haven't even played yet, and many I will never play!

And all of that doesn't even consider the fact 99% of good games take longer than 2 hours to play unless someone hates it.

So really, any numbers of refunds are actually cases of buyer regret, bad software that crashes, or outright developer deception, and not some case of users thinking they can somehow cheat the developers they love out of money. I mean, they're playing the game, right? So by extension they like the developer.

99% of people, if given an opportunity to pay a what they see as a "reasonable price", will pay for a game. And as I've shown, if the price is right, we'll pay for stuff we don't even play!

When I was a broke kid, I pirated games all the time. In the last ten years I've pirated ONE game. South Park Stick of Truth because I'm a diehard Southpark fan and I was so broke I almost went homeless. But now, not only do I buy games instead of pirating them, I REBUY games I USED to pirate as a kind of retribution. I've bought System Shock 2 at least three times now (Steam, Steam, and GOG). I've got Age of Empires 2 at least twice. Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (GOG) to play OpenRCT2. Thief 1, 2, and 3. I bought Monkey Island 1 and 2 on Steam and GOG because I forgot I already had them! (Never pirated those though, but the point is I'm buying multiple copies!)

One report shows increased sales because people are more willing to take a risk on a game (and then either enjoy it, or just forget about it.)

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/250055/How_are_Steam_refunds_shaking_out.php

One problem you mention does exist:

But... how many people are doing that? I mean, it's a hassle to set up an account just to play TWO HOURS of a game and even then, it would only work on multiplayer games where there is no progression because you're going to lose all your progress every account reset.

This is a good graphic:

{"name":"Garry%20Newman%20-%20Refund%20Data.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/d\/fd611ec37b857d944c380234e86b5a04.jpg","w":594,"h":334,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/d\/fd611ec37b857d944c380234e86b5a04"}

I imagine most people answer honestly because there's no benefit to NOT answering honestly.

The majority of people refunding were because the DEVELOPER apparently made a game that was too crappy to run on their target audience's computer.

After seeing this graphic, I have changed my priorities for my future games. I will definitely spend a proportionate amount of time testing to ensure a diverse amount of computers can run my game.

I know for mobile development, you can actually outsource testing of apps to run on literally hundreds of cellphones at once. They can even run through an automated set of tests (user inputs, expected screen output, etc.) I imagine something like that might exist for PCs.

[edited numerous times]

Ah, those old days when nobody kept records on how long you played something you bought.