Rust sales surpass 250,000 on Steam Early Access

One man is now responsible for two gaming phenomenons.

Facepunch Studios founder Garry Newman has revealed that his new game, Rust (which isn’t even finished), has already reached a quarter-million in sales. The game is available now for $20 on Steam’s Early Access platform, which enables developers to sell pre-release titles to customers.

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Facepunch only released Rust on Dec.11, and it’s already started to eclipse Garry’s Mod, which is Newman’s previous, very successful project.

“Yeah — we never, ever expected anything to dwarf GMod’s success,” Newman told GamesIndustry International. “I did some rough maths this morning: In terms of profits, from sales and royalties, in a month, Rust has made about 40 percent of what GMod has made in about nine years. We can’t really believe it.”

Garry’s Mod is a virtual playground that enables gamers to mess around with the physics and other features of Valve’s Source development engine. The mod doesn’t work on its own. Gamers need to couple it with one of Valve’s Source games — Half-Life 2 or Left 4 Dead, for example — to get it to work.

Over nine years, however, Garry’s Mod has sold incredibly well and enabled Newman to fund projects like Rust.

Rust is an open-world survival game where players need to gather supplies and food to survive in a virtual world. Naturally, that world is home to other players who are also trying to survive, and you are all competing over the same resources.

The game isn’t finished. In fact, a warning on Rust’s Steam Page explains that the game could change a whole lot between now and when it gets its “final release,” but that’s not stopping gamers from making it the best-selling game on Steam right now.

While Newman started out alone, he has beefed up his studio to help with Rust. Facepunch now employs about 15 people — some of those new hires come from the Garry’s Mod community.

Rust is part of a recent wave of Early Access games that have taken over the charts on Steam. Facepunch’s title only just passed developer Bohemia Interactive’s zombie-survival shooter DayZ as the No. 1 selling game on Steam. Bohemia has sold more than 1 million copies of DayZ since it debuted on Dec. 16.

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In addition to Rust and DayZ, which are hugely successful standouts, a handful of other games in the top-20 best sellers on Steam are Early Access titles. That includes racing title Next Car Game, space-exploration title Starbound, and another zombie-survival game, 7 Days to Die.