Survival game Rust has sold more than 12 million times

The multiplayer survival sandbox game Rust has sold more than 12 million copies since its release in December 2013. That number probably includes both the versions sold for the PC and the versions sold for the Xbox One and PS4.

Developer Facepunch Studios reports in an update on Steam that 12.48 million copies of Rust have now been sold. That happened in just over eight years. To date, 1.11 million DLC packs for Rust have been sold. The company speaks of 2021 as an “exceptional year in all respects”.

The developer points out, among other things, that the game exploded on Twitch last year and that records were broken in terms of player numbers. The peak for the number of concurrent players online is 267,211. Since 245,243 players was the peak for Steam so far, the rest will come from the consoles. The game was released in Spring 2021 for Xbox One and PS4.

Rust still has an active player base and was more popular in the past year than in all previous years. The peak of 245.243 on Steam was an outlier. That was achieved in January 2021 and since then there haven’t been that many simultaneous players online. Last weekend, a peak of 153,000 was reached on Steam.

The survival game is characterized by a monthly regularity on which the official servers are reset. Players then have to start over building a base, whether or not bothering other players, and getting the necessary blueprints for crafting weapons.