In an alternate timeline, Satisfactory could've had a different (and surely worse) title.
If you’re here ready to debate my declaration of “the best-named game of all time,” I’m going to suggest you’ve never played Satisfactory, because it embodies its name perfectly. It’s the kind of pun you write on a white board to cause an entire room to spontaneously groan, because everyone wants to roll their eyes but also knows they’ll never better it. When the developers at Coffee Stain were first working on Satisfactory, though, they weren’t all in agreement that the name was destined. In fact, it was a bit of a fight.
“This was before I worked at Coffee Stain, but I know the story,” community manager Snutt Treptow said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. “When we were brainstorming we had a bunch of ideas, a bunch of different names. Satisfactory ended up being one of the names that stuck with some people. And some people really hated this name.”
The defenders argued that Satisfactory was just too perfect a name: it explained the factory-building concept right in the title! The others were worried that people would associate it with meaning “adequate” or “okay” rather than something more positive. But eventually the proponents won everyone else on the team over. And it turned out they’d been worried about selling themselves short for nothing—though it probably helped that the game lived up to its name and then some.
“It ended up being that most people, and I assume maybe most who are not native English speakers, didn’t relate it to [meaning just adequate],” Treptow said. “Most people related to ‘satisfaction.’ So when they say Satisfactory, it’s like, ‘Satisfactory. It’s very satisfying to do this.’
Satisfactory’s former community manager Jace Varlet recently shared his own memories of the same story, tweeting that he was “VERY wrongly” against Satisfactory initially, worried it “sold the game as mediocre.” But that ended up later working to their benefit as a joke to deploy in their marketing.
Satisfactory is at the top of an elite tier of punsmanship that few videogame titles aspire to. I’d say there are a few that come close: Splatoon; Contra: Hard Corps; Invisible, Inc.—but none of them embody the emotion you’re feeling the entire time you’re playing. With every factory you bring whirring to life and every conveyor belt you feed an endless stream of parts, just try not feeling deeply satisfied. Can’t be done.
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