Aside from the new projects, the past year was also marked by the revival of old ones. In particular, such was the fate of Rust, a survival sandbox from 2018. The game was able to triple its indicators on Twitch in just a month, as well as earn 2M dollars at once in a single day on Steam – although, in 2020, it didn’t even make it into the top 10 of its genre.
What is this Rust?
Rust is a survival simulator in which players need to collect resources, craft items, and do everything to strengthen their presence on the server and avoid getting killed by other players.
The project has been in early access on Steam since 2013, but the full-fledged release took place only in 2018. The average number of Rust players on the digital platform amounted to 55K in 2020, but already in January 2021, the mark of 97K average players was reached along with 243K peak players.
What was the secret of revival?
It is simple – media personalities and non-stop drama between the streamers. The main reason for the renewed interest was a private server from the OfflineTV content team. It was possible to enter it only by invites – which is how famous streamers as xQc, Pokimane, and Shroud met face to face in an enclosed survival area.
Initially, the all-star cast was interesting to watch on its own – but then even greater interest was fueled by scandals, and xQc became one of the central figures of them.
The most popular streamer of 2020 mostly attracted attention with his aggressive playstyle, which got him into scandals with such streamers as Myth and Ash_on_LoL. Grinding and bullying are far from being trendy in 2021, and so there was talk about banning xQc and generally closing the server for all other streamers.
As a solution to this situation, the server was split into two: "The Divide" for role-playing and "The Badlands" for PVP.
In order to further attract viewers to watch broadcasts, the streamers turned on Twitch Drops, allowing the viewers to receive game loot.
Interestingly, half a million game accounts have already been banned due to a violation of the server rules. Even Garry Newman, the creator of the game, noted that streamers are trying to gain extra views with aggressive behavior – so having this many bans shouldn’t be surprising.
How has the performance of Rust improved in just a month?
Hours watched displayed 483% growth in the three weeks of January as compared to Q4 2020! While Rust was only streamed by 849 channels in December, this same figure increased to 3.2K channels on January 1st.
January 10th was when Rust got its 1.3M peak viewers indicator. On this day, many streamers played Rust at the same time, causing the entirety of their audience to follow their adventures.
Interestingly enough, Rust’s peak viewers indicator was higher than that of Cyberpunk 2077 upon its release. But most importantly, for the first time in a long while, it seems that we have a new contender for the most popular category of the month. Just Chatting was holding the platform’s top spot for eight months in a row – but with such growth, Rust may overtake it in January.
We also compared Rust to popular multiplayer semi-survival games, from which it can be seen how Rust lagged behind in Q3/Q4 2020. In January, once the hype surrounding other titles died down, Rust was able to become the most popular survival game on Twitch.
Who is giving survival lessons on their streams?
Over the scope of just two weeks, Rust was literally invaded by the entirety of most recognizable Twitch streamers after the category had experienced a large-scale revival. That's why we've generated top 10 Rust streamers till January 21.
When it comes to the popular content creators, only Shroud and xQc remained in the top in January, with the latter being the top streamer of 2020 based on hours watched. The rest of most popular Rust streamers of 2020 were sidelined by various top Spanish-speaking and English-speaking streamers, including those who started this whole wave of hype in the first place: OfflineTV.
However, the popular streamers playing Rust don't limit themselves to the OfflineTV server alone. Spanish content creators decided to keep the competition up, and therefore Auronplay, El Rubius, Ibai, and TheGrefg played on the EGOLAND server.
The future of the game
It's been two years since the game's release, but fans are still waiting for the title's console version. While the developers promised to launch Rust on consoles back in 2020, they ran into some problems with porting. However, they’ve discussed their plans in an official statement, and based on that, it seems that in 2021 we will finally be able to play this survival game on PS4 / PS5 and Xbox One / Series S and X.
