Is sending Factorio to your competitors' engineers a cost-effective means of sabotage?

In light of the above tweet, and Ned Beauman's How ‘Factorio’ seduced Silicon Valley — and me (permalink), I wanted to approximate the magnitude of damage you could inflict with a Mass Steam Gifting Event of Factorio.

My mate Huw recently made this funky library called dist, a lightweight alternative to Squiggle designed to be used with a batteries-included notebook environment such as Observable, where Squiggle is a minimalist programming language for probabilistic estimation.

Let's put dist, and my HTML-embeddable notebook environment @celine/celine through their paces:

First, we'll import dist and make it available globally. It's got a bunch of useful distribution creation functions mirroring those in Squiggle.

Let's take a look at the engineering compensation levels of some random company on Levels.fyi. I dunno, uhhh, Anduril. Compensation distributions are typically lognormal, so plugging in $228kUSD as a 5th percentile and $406kUSD as a 95th percentile seems fine.

Let's normalize to a per-minute rate to make it easier to compare with the next distribution.

Let's say for a given gifting of Factorio to an engineer 20% already own it, 60% play nothing, but 20% lose 1hr to 5hr^† of productive work to playing Factorio instead.^‡

So the lost value per week across the engineering workforce is:

So an average of about is lost per week.

Given that Factorio (bundled with its far more potent expansion, Space Age) costs $70USD all up:

it would take about to break even.