My most-played game of the last 5 years is 30% off on Steam right now, alongside a ton of other factory games that can absolutely devour your life

Character in space suit looking at a bright light

(Image credit: Coffee Stain Publishing)

This news story is as much a warning as it is a recommendation: The winner of PC Gamer's 2024 Best Sandbox award, Satisfactory, is currently 30% off as part of a new Steam sale following hot on the heels of the bigger summer sale.

I give Satisfactory my highest recommendation: as I wrote in our awards celebration last year, it "has the same endlessness as Minecraft, only trading the RPG-esque mechanics for the compulsive satisfaction of arranging conveyor belts at perfect 90 degree angles and building realistic supporting struts for factories that the game would let me leave floating in the air if I chose to thumb my nose at gravity." But I also want you to know what you're getting into, because if you're like me, playing Satisfactory could be signing up for a multi-year obsession with building more efficient assembly lines, cooler megastructures, and increasingly impractical but entertaining ways to thread train tracks across a giant open world.

Do you have hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of your life to devote to such a pursuit? Then you can now do so for $28 (£23.45). The game's recent 1.1 update even added some exciting stuff, including controller support, an elevator, and a conveyor throughput monitor that will tell you exactly how many items are passing through each belt every minute.

Steam's Automation Fest, which is running for the next week, covers much more than just Satisfactory, should your factory building interests lean more towards enormous celestial constructions (Dyson Sphere Program), shapes (Shapez 2), or 1980s Japanese robots (Kaizen: A Factory Story).

There's also one of the most highly rated puzzle games PC Gamer has ever scored, Opus Magnum, on sale for half price. Like Satisfactory, every one of these games has the dangerous potential to make you forget about such things as eating food or showering for frankly dangerous spans of time. Choose your factory timesink wisely: if you're not careful, you may just be coming up for air when one of the next Steam sales, August's strategy-focused 4X Fest, ties you up for the rest of the year.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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