They get all these people around the world making complicated painted shapes which they can then use for their own nefarious purposes.

Joking aside, governments don’t only do things they can directly gain from, they sponsor or subsidise various activities which they believe are beneficial (eg in this case strengthening a domestic software or games industry seems like the sort of thing a government might spend some grant money to do).

BTW for people who like these sort of factory genre games, shapez2 is really great in my opinion, and for an early access title, performance has been silky smooth for me so far even in quite large factories although I haven’t got to real megafactory status yet.

Germany wants to strengthen their game industry by giving grants to game developers. Since 2019, 550 projects were partly funded by the government. [1]

[1] https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/EN/Dossier/games.html

It's just a development grant