Rust Is Seeing A Massive Resurgence Thanks To Big-Name Streamers
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2020 saw large streamers take the relatively obscure hidden role game Among Us and turn it into one of the biggest games of the year, breaking records in the process. Now it seems that Rust is the latest multiplayer game to receive a massive boost from the Twitch audience.
As one of the earliest hits in the free-for-all survival genre, Rust has always enjoyed a sizable audience, despite first emerging in Early Access in 2013. However, over the past two weeks, streamers with large audiences like Shroud, Pokimane, Myth, and many others have all joined the same server provided by Offline TV. This led to over a million Twitch viewers for the game on January 3, as well as a new peak of 135,000 concurrent players on Steam.
Rust received Twitch drops shortly after this resurgence. They became available on January 7.
Rust is currently only available on PC, and it usually costs $40, though it’s currently on sale for around $27. The game receives regular updates, including a recent one that added a major tech tree to the game, and an upcoming update on January 7 will add Twitch drops to the game. Today, as of this writing, Rust is the 6th most played game on Steam, with 109,000 players, and it is the most watched game on Twitch with around 750,000 viewers.
Before this peak, Rust was lucky to be hitting 100,000 viewers on Twitch, which gives you an idea of just how intense this influx has been. As usual with this sort of game, it appears that there has been some conflict between those players who seek out PvP and those who were looking for more of a roleplay-focused experience. This led to the announcement of a new, smaller server that will incentivize roleplaying over rampant PvP.