(But it’s also heavily on sale right now, for $15 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/)
Personally, I don’t mind at all. For one I bought it at $30, but also I have 2,000 hours logged. Per hour that’s a cost of $0.02 per hour (at the new price) if I had bought it at $40. I’m all for calling out studios like ubisoft for being greedy, but coffee stain has done a very fair job with Satisfactory IMO, and they very well deserve $10 more for the game.
That being said, go pick it up now for $15
I am unironically saying that, as a career software engineer, fixing bugs and adding new features to an existing product is about 80% of a programming job.
While it’s certainly true that some classes of bugs are very easy to fix (“oh shit I forgot to apply the correct style”; “I mean to use this method whoops”), many bugs that exist in later-stage games require pulling a bunch of shit apart to figure it out. They’re in the same pool of difficulty usually as performance optimizations or balancing new functionality. Getting a successful test case can be difficult even if the bug is readily apparent. Getting the regression test to pass is the subject of a plethora of literature. It can be hard and difficulty often scales with codebase. If the bug was obvious and easy, it would have been done before.
If it was obvious and easy and wasn’t done before because of time constraints, devs can still charge more because their wages should have gone up. This whole thread OP is kinda nuts (not the commenter I’m vehemently agreeing with and expanding on).