Rust Popularity Surge Earns $1 Million For Developer Twice In Past Week

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Twice this week, Rust developers from Facepunch earned more than $1 million in revenue thanks to the game’s sudden popularity surge. It all started with a handful of well-known streamers investing their time in the online survival title once again.

Rust is a relatively old game, which first released on Steam Early Access back in 2013. Although the title has never been completely abandoned by players as it managed to maintain a healthy audience, the most recent growth in popularity is somewhat unexpected. Much like in the success story of Among Us in 2020, streamers are to blame for Rust's current success. All of a sudden, big names like Jacksepticeye, Myth, and Shroud joined the game’s servers resulting in a huge popularity boost. Rust climbed up to the top of Twitch in terms of concurrent viewers and set a new record in players’ numbers on Steam.

According to Rust’s development team from Facepunch, renewed interest in the survival game resulted in revenue growth for the studio. As shared by Garry Newman on Twitter, the title earned more than $1 million twice this week. The exact days in question were January 4th and January 7th. In the comment section, players are already jokingly expressing their hopes of converting the impressive revenue into Garry’s Mod 2 or at least a seasoned external development team to handle Rust’s console ports. Whatever the case, the game is undeniably experiencing a Renaissance of sorts, which is being enthusiastically welcomed by the community.

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Rust’s explosive popularity helped the game to set another big record in concurrent players’ numbers with over 200,000 survivalists enjoying the title simultaneously. It’s almost twice as much as the previous record of 125,000 concurrent players, which was set last year. This is an impressive achievement for such an old title, to say the least, although a fairly understandable one. Popular streamers have brought their devoted viewers along, and they've willingly joined the Rust experience directly instead of just watching it on streaming platforms.

It’s not quite clear why several popular streamers decided to hop into the Rust action at this particular time, but the whole situation looks somewhat suspicious. Record online numbers, amazing viewership on Twitch, and huge revenues could all indicate that the renewed interest in the game was cautiously planned by Facepunch to prepare a foothold for the upcoming console release. Such a subtle and natural promotional campaign might work as an efficient tool to attract console players who are expecting the game to launch soon.

Rust is available on PC and is coming to consoles this year.