What is also interesting, is that we had a lot more sales on our site before we launched on Steam.
Well duh it wasn't on Steam before it was on Steam.
I think most people have gotten away from privately buying game licenses, both for reasons of convenience (if it's on Steam I can expect a certain capability of integration like shift-tabbing and can throw money at it) and for almost a sense of security: there's possibly an option of refunds/reviews/etc. See something like EA's garbage where they don't even allow reviews, or MMO's that sell year subscriptions but shut down servers six months after coming out.
I'll mention I did play one tutorial in .16, for about 20 minutes, and was REALLY thrown off when I joined a game. I was handheld in multiplayer, that's why I didn't play any more tutorials.
I don't remember if tutorials blinked when they were available. Relating the oil change in 17 to ease players into oil, I've still seen a few people having issues with it, it might be pertinent to re-think how it's done. There could even be a "fluids" tutorial when a recipe containing fluids is first available, so that people don't get burned by being unable to rotate an assembler or something, in addition to a tutorial that transitions from basic processing to advanced processing. I could see a situation where someone ran a pipe along the back of their oil refinery (or the front), and when they go to advanced processing they suddenly get ERER can't mix fluids (the oil pipe is in front of the water connection, or petro is connected to light/heavy), and there's nothing to tell them what's going on. Maybe literally right there, if one gets the message you can't mix fluids, bring up a blinky option for a tutorial under technology to explain what that means, going over pipe connections, machine recipes, and maybe the refinery. It'd be a lot less frustration for that specific case, and an "oh I see, that makes sense".
I always wondered what/where the "campaign" people talked about was. Figured it was a private thing or something I had to download. Did it used to be under a scenario? I played the old wave defense, don't remember what else there was.
I agree with that tutorial, campaign, and demo mean very different things. Tutorial: tell me what to do, and what the goals are. I have no freaking clue
how to play this game or what I should want, so tell me what I should be doing and let me do it myself. Demo: I can probably play the game fine, but if there are unique/special things, show me and make me think it's interesting. I know you won't let me play with all the features, and may only have some of the "lower-tier" stuff available. Campaign: long winded thing, which isn't going to be completely relevant to the "normal" gameplay. Normal RTS campaign: progress each map, slowly introducing me to new units and more mechanics, while making it challenging. FPS: same deal, more guns, more bad guys, more complicated levels. Simulators: mostly like the normal game, but throw difficulty curveballs or make stages which emphasize certain gameplay mechanics i.e. if it's Sim City, give me a flood zone, or start me off with a ton of impoverished people and high crimes, etc.
Factorio's obviously not those, but campaigns have common themes of story, difficulty progression, a semi-fixed set of tools for each level/scenario that let me play with different combinations, etc. The biggest difference is Factorio emphasizes the numbers/automation and time game above most of the other mechanics (not to be insulting, but like the enemies aren't overly complicated, there's no automatic tree harvesting for coal vs tree generation, normal game doesn't give many choices for managing pollutions in a small time frame, etc). In that sense it's not very well suited to a shorter "campaign". I'd feel stuff like supply games are more of a proper "campaign" in Factorio. You can't make an army, so a "build up forces to conquer the local jerks" doesn't make sense. A story could be made with using the jeep and driving from factory to factory, completing objectives at each factory (meet a production quota by reorganizing a set-up, make something new, clear the biters with the weaponry provided to access resources they need, whatever else one can come up with). Switching surfaces or save games as a means of indicating "now you're doing something completely different, get ready".