[Update]: After nearly a decade in development, Factorio has now finally been released!

Given the current pandemic and plethora of delays that have been announced over the past few months, you might expect that the same fate would befall Factorio. However, in an interesting twist, Factorio developers have instead pushed the launch version's release date forward five weeks, to August 14th!

"The main reason to change the release date is the release of Cyberpunk 2077," reads the official update. "We think any release close to such a monumental game is going to feel some negative effects, such as everybody playing and covering Cyberpunk and taking attention away from other games. So we thought it was best to try release either before Cyberpunk or quite a while after it. Given the two choices, we opted to bring the release date forward."

"The general feeling in the office is that the game is pretty much done, and that we want to get it released as soon as possible. The sooner we get some closure on version 1.0, the sooner we can start thinking about fun and exciting new things. So due to the co-incidence of canceling several major features, we can afford to bring the release date forward. To be clear, we didn't cancel or postpone any features due to the Cyberpunk release date."

To be perfectly honest, I'm not even slightly worried about the developers rushing things in order to meet the new deadline. In my eyes Factorio was pretty much perfect an entire year ago, so any sort of polish and features they're still planning to add are just the cherry on top. Either way, I do look forward to seeing what the 'final' version of Factorio will look like!

You can learn more about Factorio, as well as check out what the developers are currently working on, by hopping over to the official website.