I've had my fair share of being pick-axed in the face, but also people helping me out or letting me hang out. Q:Rust is fairly brutal, like many PvP games, but there's also some genuine friendliness, too. It's obviously further down the line than most early access games are, but you're paying more, too. Garry Newman:I don't know - there are AAA studios who do stuff like that, plenty of them have offers where if you pre-order something you can get into the beta and play it early. Do you think a major publisher could get away with that? Essentially you're having people pay you to test your game for you, which is an obvious boon for an indie. Q:Early access is an interesting model, still in it's infancy. That money has given us a bit of security, and we've not been in a rush to release a game, until it's something we're kind of proud of, that we think is going somewhere. We'd be coming home from work every night and working on the game. If we didn't have the money from GMod, I think we'd be doing it for free. Garry Newman:It's a good point, but yeah, I do. Would you have been able to make Rust without having done GMod first? Q:GMod's success has obviously given you a bit more room to manoeuvre, and some room to fail and experiment, to take your time over getting it right.
GMod's good for that because those people know who we are, they know that they're not just working for a company that's just existed for a month - they know their jobs are secure. People are good at their jobs, so they should be able to just get on with what they're doing. It's sort of self-managing - we don't have any actual managers, really. Garry Newman:We run it kind of like Valve - we just let people get on with it. Q:With great power etc - how is it being a serious MD? Garry Newman:Yeah, we've hired in the last year - we've got about fifteen people working for us now. Q:How big is your team now? You must have scaled up. 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. Garry Newman:Yeah - we never, ever expected anything to dwarf GMod's success. Still, it's surprising how many people did buy it. Garry Newman:Well, people like doing the opposite of what you ask them, don't they? We never exactly wanted people to not buy the game, as such, but at the same time it serves as a warning - if they buy it then it crashes we can say 'we told you so'! "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" Q:You've had very impressive sales numbers so far: nearly a quarter of a million people have ignored you when you told them not to buy the game yet. We caught up with Newman to find out how development of the vicious multiplayer survive 'em up was progressing, how nice he thinks his players are and whether or not he thinks it'll ever be finished. 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.
#GAMES LIKE GARRY S MOD MOD#
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. Or those who just want to shoot headcrabs out of a trebuchet.
#GAMES LIKE GARRY S MOD HOW TO#
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 $22 million in revenues and establishing itself as an accessible tool for budding developers, animators and scripters.
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. Garry Newman's eponymous Garry's Mod is quite the phenomenon.