Steam blocked this Factorio homage's early access release 5 times, so its developer threw caution to the wind with a full release instead - and now he's sold 2 million copies

Ahead of today's 1.0 release of Shapez 2, its lead developer acknowledges that his first attempt to launch an answer to Factorio didn't go quite as smoothly as his second. The sequel has already secured thousands of overwhelmingly positive reviews during its 20 months in early access - but for the first Shapez, Springer admits that "everything that you should do" for a successful launch, "I ignored."Unsurprisingly, Springer's journey to creating his own factory sim series started with Factorio.