A number of acclaimed indie developers have gone on to open publishing branches so they can help other up-and-coming teams share their projects with the world. This has been the case for studios with extensive industry experience, such asRare veterans in Playtonic Games afterYooka-Laylee; as well as less established names like Yacht Club Games afterShovel Knight.Satisfactorydeveloper Coffee Stain Studios also branched out following the success ofGoat Simulator.
WhenGoat Simulatorreleased in 2014, its frantic and broken physics-based exploration captured the Internet’s attention, helping spawn a sort ofparody “simulator” genre. The game famously recouped all its development costs within 10 minutes of launch on April 1, and by four months it sold nearly a million copies. This was Coffee Stain’s big break, “our 15 minutes in the spotlight” according to CEO Stefan Hanna, andGoat Simulator’s follow-up seems to have benefited for it. Game Rant spoke to Hanna aboutSatisfactoryhitting three million sales around mid-December 2021, and Coffee Stain’s history leading up to it.
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Coffee Stain Studios: From Student Projects to Goat Simulator
Hanna shares what he feels is “the story of a million developers,” growing up with a passion for playing games that led to him pursuing development as a career. He specifically recallsTetrison NESsparking his imagination around eight or nine years old, trying to figure out how it decides which block comes next, and he went on to study programming at the University of Skovde, Sweden. He and the eight other founders of Coffee Stain met while studying different disciplines in this program.
“We were a group within the group, kind of. Of course people came and went, but there was a clear connection between us over those three years, and we followed through to start Coffee Stain.”
Coffee Stain’s first published title was the iOS puzzle-platformerI Love Strawberriesin 2010, followed bySanctumin 2011. This first-person tower-defense game began as anUnreal Tournamentmod developed for a school project between five people (Hanna not included), but it became something more when the team received positive feedback from Epic Games via one of its “Make Something Unreal” competitions. “Even hearing something from a studio when you’re students is an important thing,” Hanna said. “That was the project we felt like we could take from a mod to a game in only a year.”
An incubator helped Coffee Stain off the ground, andSanctumwas enough of a success that it let the teamwork on a sequel. Hanna saidSanctum 2reached “way beyond our limits,” as Coffee Stain committed to releasing on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 simultaneously with less than two years of development time; followed by aone-year season pass inspired byBorderlands 2. “I don’t know what we were thinking, we were stupid.” The studio wanted to “have some fun” after running withSanctum 2for so long, and madeGoat Simulator"in a couple of weeks" according to the game’s website. The rest, as they say, was history.
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Expanding Horizontally
AfterGoat Simulatorblew up, the team iterated on it through December 2015. The funding it provided allowed Coffee Stain to follow through on a goal established with that incubator early on: “Growing horizontally, not just building a big studio but having smaller groups.” It helped Stockholm studio Gone North Games publishA Story About My Unclein May 2014, and that team went on to makeGoat ZandGoat Simulator: Waste of Spacebefore being acquired and renamed Coffee Stain North in 2018.
Gothenburg studio Lavapotion formed in 2017 to work on turn-based strategy gameSongs of Conquest, and Coffee Stain invested a significant minority in the company that April. Coffee Stain Publishing also officially started in 2017, going on to help with titles like Ghost Ship Games’Deep Rock GalacticandIron Gate AB’sValheim. It felt “natural” for Coffee Stain to separate ventures, Hanna said, with some members of the original team moving to Publishing as they hired on more help - but never too much. “We like to grow in a way that doesn’t make anyone an anonymous pawn in the company,” he said.
Satisfactory and the Ever-Growing Factory
Amid this expansion, the original Coffee Stain Studios began prototyping new ideas in 2016.Satisfactorywas pitched by the same person who was the driving force forSanctum, Hanna said, giving a first-person twist toWube Software’s building and management gameFactorioas it previously had for the tower-defense genre. Hanna saidSatisfactorywould not exist withoutFactorio, but its spin would be a “more unique and immersive” take.
SanctumandSatisfactoryshare DNA, with the latter originally envisioned as something of a third sequel - even using the same base code that’s evident through elements like the build gun. There have been talks about connecting their lore (which Hanna is a proponent of), but it was decided this “wouldn’t make much sense.” While Coffee Stain lovesSanctum, Hanna ultimately feels it was the right choice to makeSatisfactoryits own game.
“If you look atSanctumandSatisfactoryyou can see that they make a lot more sense for us as a studio and what kind of games we’re drawn to.Goat Simis the joker in the deck, in that sense.”
Hanna discusses plenty of other changes at Coffee Stain over the past few years.THQ Nordic (later Embracer Group) acquired the main development studioand its publishing arm in November 2018, midway through work onSatisfactorybefore its Early Access launch in March 2019. Then in October 2020, former Coffee Stain Studios CEO Johannes Aspeby moved over to Publishing, and Hanna took over after a nearly 10-year stint as programmer.
Now thatSatisfactoryhas reached three million sales in less than three years, Hanna says it’s “super awesome” to see the supportive community grow. The biggest difference betweenGoat SimulatorandSatisfactoryhas been concurrent player numbers, as Hanna feels the team’s latest venture is, “Not just a game you buy on sale and store for a rainy day, people come in and play.” Moving into 2022, he said his goal as CEO is working toward Version 1.0, moving out of Early Access. While it has been challenging to round things off, he said that release “doesn’t mean it’s the end of content.”
Satisfactoryis available now on PC.
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