Gaming

Not that your suggestion is necessarily bad in general, but I don't really think it's necessary when it comes to Factorio. I think it should be clear from playing the demo whether 100+ more hours of that seems worth the asking price for someone. It's probably the most representative demo I've ever played; the full game is just the demo but more. There are no surprises down the line. There are no random pivots to other genres, or the game trying to stick its fingers in too many pies. There's no narrative to screw up. There's no "oh, they clearly just spent all their time polishing the first hour of the game and the rest of it is a technical mess". It's the same gameplay loop from the demo for another 50 hours until you "win".

... and then another 50 hours after that when you decide to optimise things. And then another 100 hours when you decide to make a train-themed base. And then another 700 hours when you discover some of the mods that exist...

This is how I buy all of my single player games.

If anyone hasn't tried it, highly recommend 'demoing' Outer Wilds.

This. I've run a bunch of lan parties where we just copied factorio around all the computers. The developers don't really do any DRM. Intentionally. The only restriction for a pirated copy, really just a copied copy, is that you can't play on servers that do username authentication. But for self-hosted servers you can disable that. Like for a lan.

And for all the people who came to the lan and played, nearly 100% of them bought the game. Because they love the game.

So if this is the kind of game you love, and you genuinely can't afford it, pirate it, I think the whole community is behind you. And if you can afford it please buy it