When you spawn in Factorio, you find yourself alone on an alien planet. Your goal is to build a rocketship so you can go home. However, your factories pollute the air; as you use resources and release toxins, the planet’s creatures come attack you out of anger that you’re ruining their planet. I was surprised that this was built into the very premise of the game.
Of course, Factorio is in no way about solving the problem. You are rewarded for polluting then building guns to shoot the indigenous bug creatures that are angry you’re poisoning their home then building automated guns then running ammo to them with conveyor belts. It’s awesome. And definitely not about using fewer resources. Well, you could play the game that way, and some do for the challenge, but most are just here to watch the world burn.
It would be generous to say that Factorio is an environmentalist game. It could be, for some people, if they reach the conclusion that the only way to go to space is to ruin the planet, or just as a forcing function to think about the expenditure and reduce waste. It is a part of peoples’ strategy when playing vanilla Factorio to not be wasteful, especially early on, to delay the aliens attacking for as long as possible. I’ve never seen a friend delay it forever, though. It doesn’t seem to be the point.
And it’s kind of funny that the game makers had to give us a deus ex machina in the form of aliens (to us; they’re just home, to them) as punishment for polluting.