A month back, news came out that Rust — the ultra-successful survival game from Garry’s Mod creator Garry Newman — would be rebooting. Then, a few days ago, Newman’s Facepunch dev team revealed a new game. That announcement was met by outrage from Rust players. Why work on something new when your successful but famously unfinished game wasn’t in its final form yet? But Newman says Rust fans don’t need to worry.
Announced late last week by Facepunch designer Adam Woolridge, twin-stick shooter Riftlight will weave action-RPG elements into an outer-space action game. It’s a big departure from Rust’s first-person pants-free scavenging. Some complainers think that a smaller studio like Facepunch can’t work on both a big, early-access multiplayer game like Rust and another new game with randomly generated levels.
Newman says that’s not the case:
Are we crazy? Are we doing it wrong? Should every person in the company be working on the same thing? Should HBO make one TV show at a time? Should Warner Brothers make one movie at a time?
Our strategy at the moment is to hire talented people to make the games they want to play. We’re not asking you to fund this. We’re not starting a kickstarter and begging you for money — we’re funding it.
We are spending money Rust and Garry’s Mod make to do this. Arguing that we should be re-investing that money back into only those games is like telling apple they can’t spend the money they made from iPhone and Macs to fund the development of the iPad. Keep in mind that we spent money Garry’s Mod made to develop Rust — and that turned out pretty good, right? Or should Helk and Pat have been working on Garry’s Mod all that time?
I think a good company develops continually, and the more things we’re working on the better. I think this strategy is working out for us so far.
He goes on to explain that Rust has its own dedicated team:
Some commenters have expressed their feelings that they ‘funded’ Rust and we’re running off with the money. None of this sentence is true. We funded Rust for 1-2 years before it eventually became what it is. You bought early access to it. When you buy a pizza you aren’t funding Dominos, you’re just buying a pizza. It’s true that the sales of Rust have been insane and we have stepped up development to suit, and I think you only have to compare the experimental version to the live version to see that.
… the people who work on Rust are working on Rust. They’re not working on prototypes. That should be very obvious by the dev-blogs we post every friday.
We’ve reached out to Facepunch for comment and will update this post if they respond.
Update: Garry Newman’s responses to questions about Rust and Riftlight are below:
Kotaku: Can you tell us a percentage of Facepunch staff working on Riftlight and on Rust?
Newman: We have about 25 staff. Only one of them (Adam) is working on Riftlight. It’s not a big project by any means – it’s just a prototype. Of those 25 staff we have 5 working on prototypes. All of those are people that were hired specifically for their ability to make games on their own.
Kotaku: Will Riftlight launch on Early Access like Rust?
Newman: We don’t know. It’s too early to make any predictions about it, it’s a prototype – it could just get thrown away.
Kotaku: Any other comment on the response to the Riftlight announcement?
Newman: I worked it out today to see how much of our budget we were actually spending. This year, we spent 0.04% of Rust‘s income on prototyping. That’s not even counting Garry’s Mod’s income.
The Rust team haven’t lost any people.
I think it’s important to say realise that most studios are working on these prototypes (they’d be stupid if they weren’t). The only difference between us and them is that we intend to do it in the open by posting regular devblogs about them.
Hope this makes it a bit clearer.
Comments
10 responses to “Some Fans Pissed At Rust Creators For Working On New Game”
Garys right. Just another case of ill informed hyper reacting internet dickheads. In just 7 or so weeks experimental has already come a long way. Sorry its not all instantly done but I guess patience isnt a virtue any more…
Oh it’s most definitely a virtue! Just one that isn’t as easy to find these days =P
I don’t understand how this is a “new game” by anyone’s standards.
Are video games art or a commodity?
The Sistine Chapel was painted as a money making commission by a guy who thought paint was a shitty artform.
It’s impossible to separate art as a product and art as a commodity. That’s pretty much what Andy Warhol’s entire career was about.
It depends entirely on what point you’re currently arguing 😉
It’s an interesting attempt to manage expectations to say that buying into an early access game is in no way funding that game, nor are they obliged to use early access funding on that game. Might make a few people rethink other early access games.
I feel his announcement came at the wrong time. Just not long ago he announced that the game will be completely rebooted and before that was done, he announce a side project.
One thing for sure is that Garry is not in the rush to complete Rust as they already have more than enough money they were expecting from it. They are just taking their time making Rust while making another prototype to earn more side income while they do it.
I’m personally glad they are working on a couple of ideas at once, forces them to look at their games from different perspectives. Why couldn’t the “new” Rust borrow elements from these little prototypes to make a better game all round and vice versa?
While I understand the reasoning of not limiting yourself to one title at a time, the fact that they released a game to Early Access and then did not finish it, instead opting to start from scratch again isn’t exactly a solid foundation for understanding from your audience. It’s easy to throw around names like HBO, Warner Bros. and Apple as examples of having more than one project in progress at once, but they are companies with hundreds to thousands of staff with an established history of releasing product. On the other hand though, look at what happened to 38 Studios. They had an MMO in the works, diverted their resources to release Kingdoms of Amalur and still ended up never releasing their first project before folding in a heap.
So while Facepunch may very well get everything done and released, I don’t exactly have as much sympathy for them as they want.
I hate stuff like this, why is the game creator talking about other companies ?
why are you talking about HBO and apple when no one said anything about that ?
why are you talking about how you’re spending your money when all you need to say was
“don’t worry guys we have one guy working on the new game and there’s plenty of people working on rust”
stop the inane drivel and get to the point.