Rust has sold over 12m copies

Rust has sold over 12 million copies.

Making the announcement in a new year round-up, developer Facepunch revealed that as well as selling 12,481,079 copies of the game, it's also sold over one million DLC packs - a surprisingly modest number, given the number of people invested in the vanilla game, perhaps? - and has over 400,000 users on its Discord server.

The rundown also revealed the team has banned over 600,000 accounts from the game and topped 1.37 million views on Twitch. That equates to over 300 million watched hours and 1.3 billion total views on the streaming service.

"2021 was an exceptional year for Rust in almost all regards, after eight years of continuous development Rust has gone from strength to strength," the team announced on Steam (thanks, PCGN). In 2021 Rust blew up on Twitch, we saw record-high player counts, released Voice Props DLC Pack, World revamp, missions, freight trains, underwater labs, gestures, submarines, MLRS and so much more."

As for what 2022 holds? Facepunch shared a couple of sneaky peeks from its upcoming arctic monument - there's a polar bear! - which is set to release "in the very near future", and a "heap load" of QoL (quality of life) changes are coming next month, too.

Although it's been around since 2013, the survival multiplayer experienced a resurgence in popularity this time last year after a bunch of high-profile streamers set up a private server together.

The streamers, including Shroud, Pokimane, Myth, XQc and more, all uploaded their own perspectives of the island (even creating their own factions), making for compelling viewing - and seriously boosting Rust's player count in the process and setting a new concurrent user record of 244,394.