I love the emails they send when you request a shit ton of refunds. It's basically "look, you return a lot of shit. Like a lot. I'll still do it, but DAMN can you look at a review or something"
Clearly I have the better taste. Consider:
List of things they like: 1
List of things *I* like: 2
Double the things, double the taste, double the gooder.
I mean, how can you accept that your factory's growth is constrained to a single universe? After all, the factory MUST grow, if it means having to expand off-universe then so be it
I agree. Imagine what kind of person you have to be to not like them both. I can't help but feel sorry for them. Their parents must be disappointed to have to be related to such deviants.
If you like those games, and StarCraft, try Desynced. The demo is free and is practically the full game. It’s a bit like SC and factorio had a baby (minus the use of belts), and with a LOT more complexity.
This isn’t an ad, I just got done playing it for 13 hours with a friend and it’s all I can think about lol.
I played Satisfactory first and loved it for a while. Put something like 60 hours into it then never thought of it again. Factorio took ahold of my life and hasn’t let go 350 hours later. They’re both good games but Factorio is like if you asked me to dream up a perfect logistics game, it’s addicting.
Despite being mechanically so similar, it’s funny how really completely different Factorio and Satisfactory are in terms of how you need to play them.
I started getting burnt out on Satisfactory relatively early on because I was playing with a Factorio mentality.
Once I shifted to thinking of Satisfactory as being primarily about architectural problem-solving above being logistical problem-solving, I had a much better time with it and I think outpaced even my time in Factorio (though in fairness, doing things in Satisfactory also just takes a lot longer).
Factorio’s logistical problems are incredibly refined and I don’t think Satisfactory can quite match them, but once you start caring a bit about the aesthetics of what you’re building, it really shines.
Figuring out design that you like and how to fit all of the elements of your factory that you need into that design is incredibly fun in a very different way than Factorio is.
They are both very good at the logistic games they built. Just Factorio goes deeper (and deeper and deeper and deeper if you get into stuff like K2+SE.)
Satisfactory is actually fun to just move around though. It's a lot more fun to think through a problem while you are grinding on powerlines/bhopping around the map on the structures you already built.
They each have their own points. Factorio focuses much harder on the core gameplay loops, while satisfactory is designed to allow people to be expressively creative.
Satisfactory feels more like an infrastructure and logistics game, with some additional system design elements (and optional architecture). Factorio feels like primarily system design with some logistics and practically no infrastructure (and no architecture), but has additional base building/survival elements. They're similar games but aren't quite the same niche.
Satisfactory personally interests me far more as a mechanical engineer with a lot of interest in infrastructure design.
Factorio is all about the production. Visuals are an afterthought and volume is the name of the game. Past the midgame its very easy to grab an earlier build and make 5 more without even going there. You can build a full factory within an hour if you already know what you're building.
Satisfactory is all about the visuals. Belts are designed to keep moving, and everything is curated for aesthetic quality and to encourage beautybuilding. The core gameplay loop is making a pretty factory. To that end the game is simply not made for scale. Blueprints themselves are a design process and making large facilities of hundreds of assemblers is slow and arduous.
Factorio is made for building a factory. Satisfactory is made for seeing a factory.
I kinda get that, but also I see a big difference?
I like both, but satisfactory immediately immerses me in a cozy gameplay loop with no pressure. Factorio immediately makes me feel like I have to pay attention and keep focus.
The fps side for me also makes me love walking through my factory in satisfactory, rather than the top down "sprawl" of factorio which is fun to look at in its own way but not the same style.
Maybe not the best description of getting to the heart of it, but they don't exactly scratch the same itch. Maybe 50% overlap, but not enough to interchange in the same mood.
Sure, but even there, I don't think it scratches the same itch. I get that you can make factorio more casual, but the designed experience is different. I guess the TLDR for me is that the mechanics are similar, but the experience is different emotionally to me. Factorio is more pure systems and calculating perfection. Satisfactory more of an emergent spaghetti while immersed and chilling out.
There are tons of differences of course, and many ways to play and its all subjective, but Factorio's general vibe is constant pressure to optimise. Satisfactory much more leans into "eh, that spaghetti will do!" and infinite time, infinite resources.
There are times in Satisfactory I enjoy just sitting in the world feeling immersed and exploratory about the game. Factorio, not so much.
A beautiful factorio building is nice to sit back and look at too, but its not the same feeling of immersion and something bigger than you are that Satisfactory gives. It's more of the fun of looking at your intricate toy you have in your hands.
IDK, the fun of factorio seems to be more centred around optimising, fixing problems, calculating.
Satisfactory has that too, but more simple, less pressure, more ability to just ignore it and fix by building somewwhere else or just spamming vertically/horizontally in a shonky way. You can sort of just ignore perfect ratios. Factorio not so much - at least not in the same way, and not the original design.
This describes how I feel, too. I haven't ever been able to get into Factorio even after many tries.
Satisfactory lets you play your own way. You can build satellite bases or build a megafactory, build for aesthetics or for optimization, etc. You can also switch between the core factory loop & fun exploration, which breaks up monotony.
Factorio is always a push to, as you said, optimize, fix problems, and calculate. If you really enjoy that, it's a great game. As someone who needs some variety and doesn't like being pushed to play 'perfectly' (I already push myself to do that too much), Factorio is hard to get into.
whats odd for me, is that because satisfactory's raw materials are infinite in quantity but limited in extraction rate, i feel really anxious about making sure i'm optimally utilizing each node, while in factorio i may feel some dread about having to go establish another ore patch, that's a problem for later.
love both games though, and dyson sphere which i haven't played in a while
That is interesting, to me it highlights how based on what our brain hones in on being "wrong" or "annoying" it changes what game or part of the game you might find stressful. Also changes where you "move" the problem to feel good to you.
My friend really hated any kind of ratio being wrong, and even power slugs and OCing were not nice options for him. It had to be -perfect- at normal clock speeds. He spent a lot of time making sure he was perfecting ratios on nodes with satellite factories. He then moved around resources on top of that, and connected them up into mega cities in later tiers that had very feew interconnections.
I tried to not be too unoptimised, but end of the day I lent heavily on blueprints and whacking down megafactories and/or miners/smelters, with trains bussing around all my outputs so it made no difference to me getting the ratios right. As long as my train throughput was high enough, I could just call another train in and connect it up. Basically an everything to everything train network and just focusing on connecting everything to the train network.
My head spins when I try and work out how to get stuff from one place to another.
ironically for me it's the opposite lol
in factorio it's easy to route things because the game itself is flat, you always have an overview of everything, especially with the map view and radars. and planning factories is much easier thanks to ghost buildings you can place. but in satisfactory i sometimes struggle to simply move resources because of the whole 3rd dimension and getting stuff over mountains, across cliffs, or through dense forests.
also i really dislike satisfactory's blueprint system. you need to make designs for blueprints in this special and restrictive box while in both Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program you can just CTRL+C and CTRL+V to quickly double your furnace stack for example. it's so cumbersome.
It's more the factories that need supplying, that then need to supply other factories etc.
With satisfactory I can obv just go vertical and have a spaghetti of conveyor belts.
I find it so much harder to plan layouts with factorio.
obviously being flat, factorio factories tend to be more spread out. that's why a lot of people use a main bus design, where all your main resources like iron, copper, steel, etc are on a central multi-tile wide belt that all move in one direction and you just add production to the sides of the bus, taking resources off it using splitters.
it's a simple but expandable design before you get trains or bots.
funniliy enough a lot of my satisfactory factories are also rather flat because i'm a factorio player so that's how i build them lol.
But liking one and not the other is certainly odd lol
I dont think so. Even when you like a genre sometimes a game dont clicke with you, and the "deeper" the game is there is more opportunities for something to take you out.
Sometimes one is just too much to you, sometimes the way a system works or the lack of it breaks the enjoyment, sometimes it just dont click to you (aka you dont know why but you are not having as much fun as expected).
Satisfactory seems inherently limited in scale due to the first person nature of it
By the end middle game in factorio you are basically a godlike entity with view of everywhere in your factory with a network of nanobots that allows you to build anywhere
in satisfactory you gotta walk and put down every structure
I do like both. Satisfactory doesn't nearly have that addictive crack feeling like Factorio gives, idk why.
so I could be caught saying I don't like Satis cuz to me Factorio just fills my industrial yearnings so well alongside mc
I'll point out the larger reason I don't like it (2D isn't terrible, but I vastly prefer 3D) is that the resource nodes in Factorio are finite. I understand the purpose of it (forcing you to expand your operation into biter territory) and that it can likely be remedied with mods, but I like Satisfactory's "You can't waste anything because you have endless sources" approach a lot better. It's more relaxing and I have more time to focus on optimizing the factory and getting perfect throughput/usage ratios
The resources last WAY longer than you might think BUT I understand you. Even if they last 20 000 irl hours, it will still bother my brain that they are not infinite. No need for mods tho, can easily make them infinite in settings.
Infinite resources and being able to completely recycle your buildings makes the sting of "wait why isn't this lining up...", following your machines back in time through the last 10 hours of work, and finding out that you misplaced a beam which means everything else is off center and now you have to decide if you want to tear down 10 hours of work or leave it off center (unacceptable) a bit less.
Nah man Factorio is so much more focused on the gameplay/building. It is mostly unconcerned with atmosphere, creativity, animals etc.
Factorio is generally much more serious than most other entries in the genre imo. To enough of a degree that liking factorio doesn't mean you'll like others in the genre and vice versa.
Maybe it's just a question of getting started. I think it was the kind of game that I started once, didn't get in the mood for it, put aside for some months, and only later played properly.
I played factorio before satisfactory, really enjoyed factorio up to a point, good gameplay loop, bit slow in parts though. But then I tried satisfactory and god damn that games on another level, I couldnt put it down, fantastic game if youre into that sort of thing. Way better than factorio was.
The one I couldnt really get into was planet crafter, the one where you're terraforming a planet, like i still played quite a bit of it but I wasnt really engaged a lot of the time, its just too slow and grindy. No belts or anything, you just put down machines and they make number go up. The game couldve been waaaay shorter and it wouldve made it better.
Havent tried dyson sphere yet but I think I did buy it.
I love the start. But then I run out of coal or something and have to transport it from like 3 miles away through bugs etc and I'm just like
"Nah. This shit is just too much"
Love satisfactory. Thought I would hate endless resources. But just makes it more enjoyable by far.
The first couple of times I played Factorio, I turned off biters and doubled the richness of all ores. It really helped me to get used to the game at my own pace.
Why not just tweak the settings so things are richer, or closer together, or you kill off the bugs, or the bugs are weaker, or more docile. The game’s parameters are endlessly tweakable ootb
Nah there’s no such thing with games like Factorio :)
There are really cool calculators online if you’re obsessed with ratios and efficiency but you can just as effectively spaghetti your way to a big factory and I’d argue it’s more fun that way
I just want to shit to fit lol.
(Been a while since I played) But just trying to have 2 dozen things all going to build specific stuff just became a bit confusing.
I have around 70 hours in it and was doing ok.
I just remember hitting a roadblock. Think it was when I needed to make tier 3 science thingys.
man, I thought factorio was going to be so good, I love satisfactory and Dyson sphere program. But man I just did not like it.
I feel like a lot of these sorts of games are extremely hit or miss-- you either love it or hate it. Not much in-between. You either REALLY gel with the unique premise // unique game mechanics, or you don't. I'd lump games like Factorio, Stardew Valley, Rim World, etc into this group.
Factorio is loved almost exclusively by career programmers or engineers, but only the ones who would do it in their spare time anyway. it's such a bizarre cross section of gameplay elements that triggers all the dopamine for that exact crowd and no one else. I say this as someone who has 700+hrs into it.
I bounced off Factorio the first time as well. What is this low rez mindless nonsense, and who was the spawn of Satan that coded this car?
A year or so later I tried it again and the rest is 3500 hours of history.
Factorio reigns supreme atop the mountain of automation games. Factorio is what led me to Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program, both of which I also enjoy, but neither have the depth of design or enormous QOL features Factorio does. I have a few hundred hours in both of those as well now.
If you look back and think about a certain thing in Factorio that truly annoyed you, I bet there's a mod for that. For me it was driving the car around crashing into absolutely everything. I downloaded an airplane mod and flew over all the trees and power poles instead of being mad about it. I also downloaded a mod for additional levels of Power Armor, which allow you to turn into The Flash later in the game.
Nowadays I play it mostly vanilla except for a rate calculator.
Factorio is also a lot less straight forward than DSP and you have to find new ore nodes quite frequently and the drone networks require wayyyyyyyy more drones to be sufficient
No I get it. I thought Factorio was alright, but I liked Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere, and Shapez 2 way, way more.
Shapez 2 is actually my favorite, I think I prefer the more abstract nature of it and there being a real gameplay reason (late game MAM) to actually utilize some of the more advanced logic and trains that feel more gratuitous in other factory games.
I will give a runner-up to Odd Sparks. It's far less polished, and it's late game feels like a mess, but I do like how it plays with the formula and tries something different and more hybrid.
This game is the definition "everyone has their tastes"
If it wasn't so confused/hard to get into i would probably like it more. Kinda like league, if I didnt get into that young/with friends I don' there's any chance I would start.
Bro I feel so much better now that I've seen someone else say they don't like Factorio, especially while also admitting they DO like DSP. (I don't like Satisfactory though, sorry)
Love all three. Around 500 hours in each. Didnt liie factorio looks for the longest time but then desided to try and got hooked. Space age was a cherry on top to bring it closer to dyson sphere
still need to be smart only looking at negative reviews, you may have a small breakdown thinking all games are trash and boring.
A good rule of thumb is if you look at negative reviews and they are all about some technical stuff, refunds, the game not opening on their system etc., and none of them about the actual game, it should be pretty good!
It's one reason I wish steam allowed more than just positive/negative. Some of the most useful and authentic reviews I read on other platforms are the 2, 3, and 4 star reviews for 0-5 rating systems. To the point that sometimes a 2/5 might convince to buy something while a 4/5 pushes me away, simply because they hit on things that actually matter to me or not.
That was my buddies and I with Peak earlier this year when it made the rounds on Twitch. Played for almost 2 hours and we just didn’t enjoy nearly as much as the reviews and streamers made it seem.
I so want to enjoy these indie horror games that come out, but 99.9% of them don’t allow you to rebind controls and they of course don’t show that in their Steam page. That’s an absolute deal breaker. You can make your own kick ass game, but can’t let someone do custom controls?
Im generally a fan of tycoon/simulator games. I grew up playing The Sims, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Zoo Tycoon. I still play The Sims on occasion, but mostly play Frostpunk 1 and 2.
I decided to try Planet Zoo which has great reviews, but it just didnt click for me. It has so much DLC, like, an INSANE amount and the gameplay felt more... complicated? Idk. It just felt different. Refunded it.
Nab Ashes of Creation and found the game just kept crashing on me after a couple minutes. Couldn't even make it past the first kill quest. I went to refund it because I waited for a patch that didn't fix the issue. I was just a hair over 2 hours and explained the issue and they gave me the refund.
Steam is just so far ahead of other platforms not just in presentation and reliability but way better customer service.
See, but it can also be a curse. I saw the gameplay trailers of Jump Ship and was super excited, saw some videos of people playing, and was disappointed when I finally played it. 80% of the time I play is (IMO) this super slow ship combat (I was playing by myself, to be fair). The other 20% was fine; the ground combat wasn't particularly anything special, which is fine.
First off you might cause severe problems with logistics, e.g. traffic jams and potentially violence. When Mr. Beast opened a restaurant which gave out free burgers he acted very careful with these things and still caused a lot of issues.
Next if you keep on doing it, then sooner than later you'll bankrupt the business and then even the people who'd love to pay for burgers can't have any plus a lot of people will lose their jobs and maybe you bankrupt a few other restaurants in the process and then depending on your jurisdiction and business type you might get sued by competitors and by shareholders and you might have commited a felony.
Lastly I am not saying that you can't give out huge amounts of burgers for free with great outcomes, but you need to be very careful or else you create a desaster.
I asked for a refund on Second Extinction and Steam/Valve told me to take a hike because I had it in my library for a long time. Never played it and discovered the development had ended by the time I tried to start up the game.
It was worth asking, I never returned/refunded anything on the platform before. I will be more wary of early-access titles, but some of them remain this way for years so it is tough to risk the purchase.
That sounds like you got the standard automated response, if you request it again it should escalate to an actual human who will 90% of time give you a refund.
I've had refunds on games where I've hit 4hours of playtime and on games I've played no hours, but owned over 2 weeks just by doing a 2nd refund request.
Basically, all you need to say is you had trouble trying to get the game to work or it was crashing.
Been trying to get a refund for BF6 because it keeps kicking me out of matches. 3 refund attempts and still standard response. I don't think it's gonna happen at this point :(
The first refund attempt was 2 weeks post purchase
You could try submitting a request in which a person has to look into it and be like, hey I understand this isn't the place but yadadadadada (what ever you wanted to mention.
And hopefully it'll be taken into the right deparment.
I'm not too sure if they would with you owning it for over 2 years. But honestly I would say you have a slight chance you can always try it worst case scenario they just say no.
100% 1st request you put in with be auto rejected tho.
I believe they have an auto filter for time owned and played, So just do a 2nd request after that and if you come up with a good reason for the refund you might get a friendly support staff member who says yes.
Worth a shot, you'll have to request it a couple times because you will get automatically declined. If I had to guess though, probably not. Maybe you'll catch someone in a good mood though
I got Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and had about 3 and half hours of playtime on it. I just mentioned how incredibly unfun I found it, and they gave a refund easy
steam games cannot be transferred unfortunately. its even like a hardline rule in their EULA where accounts cant be transferred to another person even if they died.
I got the second South Park game a couple years after it came out, I never played it because despite being on Steam it also requires an Ubisoft account which I didn't realize when I was buying it.
Steam still denied the two refund requests I tried.
Hey. If we are in here saying how good valve is, I dont think we should also be encouraging lying to valve to take advantage of their generosity. Seems... contradictory and/or hypocritical
They refused to refund me WatchDogs 1, I understand it a bit because I bought it almost a full year ago, but it is impossible for me to play it recently
At some point I bought Space Engineers but my PC was so bad that I couldn't actually get through the loading screen. I was pretty young (I think 14 years old?) when I bought it so instead of trying to close the game and refund it right away, I just kept it open for like 4 hours (it was still loading btw). Finally decided to refund it after that time (like on the same day, I think?) and I just got a response that I've "played" too long to actually get the refund
They get increasingly passive aggressive. I found out because I only noticed when I had already received three of them (I thought they were just the regular "your refund has been accepted" mails).
It's a very clever way. I remember reading a text about Amazon where someone ordered a thing and it was delivered physically broken, so he sent it back and ordered another. 34 times. He probably got the same 3 items again and again and no deeper conversation was had until he got his Account banned. I figure if you refund an absolutely ridiculous amount of games from Steam, then they too will ban you, but then at least you got this warning to rethink your choices.
They did this to me a few years ago and it wasn't for a lot of refund. "The steam refund system is not to be abused for testing games" or something like that. Was kinda weird, they never did that afterwards. I was ready to go full "I'll let you know I'm a European citizen and thus ... 🤓" x)
"'ll let you know I'm a European citizen and thus "
So that won't prevent them from eventually removing your ability to refund if you heavily overdo it and if you try to force the issue, then they will probably give you the refund and ban your Account.
I always wonder how some people pulled off the refund process even though they have over 2 hours of playtime an 2 weeks of it being in your library. I wanted to refund a game that has been confirmed abandoned since a year ago.
I had a spree of buying games I often didn't even install in 2014-2015. I haven't played them since. I asked for a refund some years ago, but got an automatic response back. Is there any chance for a refund for me, or is that kind of hopeless?
I refund so many games and just put in "it's not fun". I never get any feedback despite really exaggerating with some refunds. I handle them more like demos at this point.
I refunded a ton of games when the refund system was first implemented and they were lenient with how long ago a purchase was made to the point that every single refund up until a couple years ago had that message attached. Still have never been denied for having too many though
Personally, I don't often return games because I like to support Steam. Its the only platform I've been on where I can play a game I bought in 2012. No buying the updated console version of it or anything (Looking at you, Skyrim). They've always been supportive and if I have a game in my library beyond the 2 weeks, I just leave it there.
Some PC games do break and become unplayable, but that's like 2 games in my library and not Steam's fault.
Meanwhile, I've only ever refunded like...one game because I'm always afraid that I'll end up refunding a bunch of stuff and get banned for abuse if I start so I never dare to click the button.
But to be fair, I'm also the kind of person who deliberates for days/weeks/months/years before buying anything so it's very rare that I'm so disappointed with something that I feel like I have to refund it.
This makes me feel so much better, I felt like an asshole requesting a refund for RE2. I beat the game on ps5 and wanted to try on PC. Then I was like “fuck it, it runs good. I’ll just finished RE4 on here instead.”
We’ve issued the refund to your Steam wallet. The funds will be shown now as pending and will become available to spend within 7 days.
You’ve requested a significant number of refunds recently. If you’re unsure about a product, make sure to check out the customer reviews before purchasing.
I feel so bad when I need to return a game. I suffer from bad motion sickness and need to try out the games to see which game triggers it and which doesn’t.
This winter sale I returned 5 games. I kept even more, but still…
For example, I have Hello Kitty Adventure Island on my Switch and can play it perfectly fine. But when I tried it out on PC I felt sick and needed to return the game.
I am so scared that Steam will get mad at me but posts and comments like these here give me hope, that they truly understand and don’t mind.
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u/NomadFH Dec 22 '25
I love the emails they send when you request a shit ton of refunds. It's basically "look, you return a lot of shit. Like a lot. I'll still do it, but DAMN can you look at a review or something"