Over the course of just five weeks, Facepunch Studios' open-world survival title Rust generated 40 percent of the nine-year sales total of Garry's Mod — the sandbox release that studio founder Garry Newman is most famous for.
Rust is currently in Alpha, leaving Newman and the rest of the team surprised by its ability to already dwarf GMod sales.
"We never, ever expected anything to dwarf GMod's success," Newman told Games Industry International. "I did some rough maths this morning: in terms of profits, from sales and royalties, in a month Rust has made about 40 per cent of what GMod has made in about nine years. We can't really believe it."
The game tasks players with gathering resources and crafting all items, including food and wood, to survive. Like DayZ, which it takes inspiration from, players face a number of non-combat related deaths. These include starvation, drowning, hypothermia, attacks from wildlife and exposure to radiation.
"The first thing people do is run around and try and bash people's heads in with a rock! They want to try and get items and build a camp," said Newman. "Then, after a while they simmer down and realize that they kind of need to work with other people, that if they help someone out they'll help them back. It goes back and forth like that."
Garry Newman's eponymous Garry's Mod is quite the phenomenon. Less of a game than a tool, GMod allows users to muck about in Valve's Source engine to create machinima, physics experiments or giant meme explosions - if you own Garry's Mod and at least one Source Engine game, you're good to go.
GMod started as a fun diversion, a project Newman took on whilst learning how to code along the way, but to date it's shifted over 3.5 million copies, booking over R239.31 ($22) million in revenues and establishing itself as an accessible tool for budding developers, animators and scripters. Or those who just want to shoot headcrabs out of a trebuchet.
Newman has capitalised on the ever-growing popularity of Garry's Mod impressively, ramping up development over nine years to turn a pet project into a valid commercial concern which employs several people and is working on a number of simultaneous projects: Facepunch Studios.
There are other bits of magic in the works, but for now it's Rust which is taking centre stage at Facepunch, selling over a quarter of a million copies via Steam's early access program and building the sort of online community engagement which many 'higher-profile' games can only dream of.
