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 as Rare veterans in Playtonic Games after Yooka-Laylee; as well as less established names like Yacht Club Games after Shovel Knight. Satisfactory developer Coffee Stain Studios also branched out following the success of Goat Simulator.
When Goat Simulator released in 2014, its frantic and broken physics-based exploration captured the Internet's attention, helping spawn a sort of parody "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, and Goat Simulator's follow-up seems to have benefited for it. Game ZXC spoke to Hanna about Satisfactory hitting three million sales around mid-December 2021, and Coffee Stain's history leading up to it.
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 recalls Tetris on NES sparking 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-platformer I Love Strawberries in 2010, followed by Sanctum in 2011. This first-person tower-defense game began as an Unreal Tournament mod 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, and Sanctum was enough of a success that it let the teamwork on a sequel. Hanna said Sanctum 2 reached "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 a one-year season pass inspired by Borderlands 2. "I don't know what we were thinking, we were stupid." The studio wanted to "have some fun" after running with Sanctum 2 for so long, and made Goat Simulator "in a couple of weeks" according to the game's website. The rest, as they say, was history.
Expanding Horizontally
After Goat Simulator blew 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 publish A Story About My Uncle in May 2014, and that team went on to make Goat Z and Goat Simulator: Waste of Space before being acquired and renamed Coffee Stain North in 2018.
Gothenburg studio Lavapotion formed in 2017 to work on turn-based strategy game Songs 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 Galactic and Iron Gate AB's Valheim. 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. Satisfactory was pitched by the same person who was the driving force for Sanctum, Hanna said, giving a first-person twist to Wube Software's building and management game Factorio as it previously had for the tower-defense genre. Hanna said Satisfactory would not exist without Factorio, but its spin would be a "more unique and immersive" take.
Sanctum and Satisfactory share 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 loves Sanctum, Hanna ultimately feels it was the right choice to make Satisfactory its own game.
"If you look at Sanctum and Satisfactory you can see that they make a lot more sense for us as a studio and what kind of games we're drawn to. Goat Sim is 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 studio and its publishing arm in November 2018, midway through work on Satisfactory before 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 that Satisfactory has reached three million sales in less than three years, Hanna says it's "super awesome" to see the supportive community grow. The biggest difference between Goat Simulator and Satisfactory has 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."
Satisfactory is available now on PC.