Facepunch Studios’ Garry Newman (developers of Rust) posted in a tweet that 329,970 units of early access game Rust had been refunded, the total amount in refunds being $4.3 million.
In a response to other Twitter account claiming that the developers of Rust were terrible, Newman responded that sometimes it’s hard to work out the bugs in the engine they are using to create the game.
“We’re not terrible programmers, but sometimes we can’t even comprehend how certain Unity bugs could possibly happen,” said Newman in another tweet.
While $4.3 million in funds may seem bad, the game has sold over 5 million copies worldwide, according to the Rust official website.
Also, Rust has around 140,275 very positive reviews overall and around 3,963 mostly positive reviews on Steam, so the refunds don’t seem to be putting a very big dent into the money that Rust has made so far.
Rust was released as an early access game in December of 2013 and is still in early access.
“We are in very early development. Some things work, some things don’t. We haven’t totally decided where the game is headed – so things will change. Things will change a lot. We might even make changes that you think are wrong. But we have a plan. It’s in our interest to make the game awesome – so please trust us,” said the developers in the Early Access Game section of its Steam page.
This, at least, gives people who want to play Rust a warning that the game may not be perfect now and that they will still be working out the bugs throughout development.
Facepunch Studios has also given a weekly Devblog that shows all the little details that have been changed in the game and Community Updates that gives the developers an opportunity to show what the community has made, whether it’s videos or fanart.
In Rust, your character is forced to survive amongst possibly 300 other players on the same server to find weapons, hunt for food (whether that be animals or people), and set up a shelter for yourself as you’re braced to fight others. The forces of nature are brutal, and radiation, starvation, freezing, falling animals, and other players will all try to kill you.
The game is in the sandbox genre, so players have the ability to create their own bases as big and powerful or as small and hidden as possible. Also, Rust gives players the ability to paint pictures in-game; some of these are presented in the weekly Community Update.
One rather interesting game mechanic is that Rust chooses your character’s race and gender, which could possibly change the way you decide to play the game or you would continue on as normal. Newman commented that this system would make players more identifiable from one another and create a unique social situation for players in an op-ed for The Guardian. More information on Rust on can be found Rust‘ official website.
It doesn’t seem like the $4.3 million in refunds will be stopping Rust from growing in popularity anytime soon. When asked what most of the complaints about the Rust refunds were, Newman said that they were “Not fun followed by bad performance – which is pretty fair I think,” in a reply to his tweet on the refunds. These refunds don’t seem to be fazing the Rust team too much.
As of right now, Rust doesn’t seem to have a release date, but if you want to buy the early access version of the game it is available on Steam for $9.99 (original price is $19.99, but it’s the Steam Summer Sale at the time of writing).
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.
