Ah thanks, I didn't spot that! Well, I thought it had worked, but obviously not.

Upon further investigation it seems like it was failing silently (well, just quiting), leaving a semi installed game.

I reverted to 12.10 and tried again from terminal to find...

133.690 Info Updater.cpp:358 ...

The game starts, but crashes within a few seconds:

Log:

0.000 2015-10-16 17:54:00; Factorio 0.12.11 (Build 17100, linux64)
0.000 Operating system: Linux
0.000 Program arguments: "bin/x64/factorio"
0.000 Read data path: /usr/games/factorio/data
0.000 Write data path: /usr/games/factorio
0 ...