Rust could never complain about too few players. The survival game has been enjoying steady popularity for some time, which has kept it in the Steam trends almost permanently. A nudge catapulted Rust just to new heights.
Between Christmas and New Years, Rust became a huge talking point on social media, which in turn brings a lot of new life. The survival game even topped its all-time high of concurrent players. What’s behind the success?
What happened to Rust?
No major content changes: With Rust, no new updates or content have caused a new rush of players, unlike, for example, with Terraria in the past. Instead, the Twitch streaming platform is at the center of the success story.
Streaming event with big names: On December 26, the well-known Twitch streamer Valkyrae invited numerous colleagues to play Rust on a private server. A total of 50 streamers came together, including well-known names such as Shroud, Pokimane, Myth, Jacksepticeye and many more. The viewer numbers for Rust shot up immediately on Twitch: In the meantime, well over 200,000 people were watching at the same time.
Rust becomes a Twitch hit: The event quickly turned out to be extremely successful and the trend continues. On January 3, over 1.2 million viewers tuned in to see Rust on Twitch. A number that developer Facepunch Studios proudly presents:
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Player numbers also benefit
The unexpected Twitch attention not only ensures viewers, but also new players on Steam – albeit not to the extent that, for example, Among Us was once the case.
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New record: With 134,255 simultaneous players, Rust posted a new all-time high on January 4th. Previously, the record was around 125,000 players in April 2020.
Last year, Rust moved, it shows Steamcharts website, mostly between 70,000 and 100,000 players who were in the survival game at the same time. The numbers of players themselves were therefore not quite as infected by the new hype as the streaming viewers. It is still enough for a place in the top sellers on Steam.
New update with Twitch support
The developers announced their regular monthly update for January 7, 2021. In the course of this, the game world and the player data are subjected to a wipe as usual: For example, all buildings created by players are removed from the map in order to herald a restart.
With the update there will also be an innovation that should be due to the streaming success: Twitch Drops. Starting January 7th, players who connect their Steam account to Twitch will be able to receive certain in-game content when they watch participating Rust streams. How extensive the drops are is not yet known.
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How long does the hype last? A question that is not that easy to answer, because that depends mainly on the streamers. If they lose interest, the audience numbers can quickly fall back to their original level. So far this is not the case and for January 7th is already the Start of a second private server for Rust announced.
