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If you don't insist on setting up your company in the most expensive city on the planet, you might not need VC money to set up a competent dev team.

You don't need VC money, but if you want to set up a dev team at all you do need some substantial capital.

But that's not what happened here, it wasn't really a choice of location or funds. It was a passion project that went viral.

They got 22k€ from a crowdfunding in 2013 :

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/factorio#/

IIRC sold more than 3 million copies by now ?

P.S.: The evolution of trailers over the years is quite something :

2013 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1qOCAM9Syw

2014 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDZM0diiYc

2016 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR01YdFtWFI

2020 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8SBp4SyvLc

No VC money, just three people developing a game they‘d like to play themselves, and it grew organically from there, financed by the money made from selling the game.

They just ported their game to Switch (another ARM platform) so once they did the legwork to make code decently arch and GPU API independent, porting to macOS probably isn't a massive overhead.