Gaming communities can be full of idiots. I'm not going to sugar coat that fact. The latest to suffer from such a community is Facepunch Studios. Recently, one of the employees, Adam Woolridge, revealed a prototype game, Riftlight, that he alone is working on. Suddenly, the Rust community loses their collective minds and begin to pick up pitchforks against Facepunch for not delivering a finished product in Rust.

They are upset that Rust development is somehow taking a back seat now. They make accusations that Rust is now cancelled because of the reveal of this prototype being developed by just one employee. They go on and on about how Early Access screws over another community and so on. Garry took to the Facepunch blog to provide some examples of the things being said.


There are plenty more, but you can see those for yourself in Garry's blog. The point stands, however, that some people are stupid. Garry attempted to make it clear that Rust development is in no way impacted by this prototype game.
There were a few things that kind of irked me in the comments about Rust. A lot of people said we gave up on Rust, and aren’t updating it anymore. Rust is getting updates very regularly. We even set up a twitter account that live posts when we commit new stuff. We are very transparent about that. I fully accept that this is our fault for not communicating the experimental branch properly, but it hurts when we’re working all week on it and people don’t acknowledge that.

Secondly the whole funding thing. People aren’t going to like my views on this. Some commenters have expressed their feelings that they ‘funded’ Rust and we’re running off with the money. None of this sentence is true. We funded Rust for 1-2 years before it eventually became what it is. You bought early access to it. When you buy a pizza you aren’t funding Dominos, you’re just buying a pizza. It’s true that the sales of Rust have been insane and we have stepped up development to suit, and I think you only have to compare the experimental version to the live version to see that.

Thirdly – the people who work on Rust are working on Rust. They’re not working on prototypes. That should be very obvious by the dev-blogs we post every Friday.

Despite this, a "Jordan Ledger" actually made a petition to "uncancel Rust" and fire Adam Woolridge. In the petition, the creator admits that he read Garry's blog update and still feels his petition is somehow justified. Please people, don't be like Jordan.

It's unfortunate that this kind of backlash over nothing is one of the pitfalls to developers wanting to be transparent of their work with the world. To fall back on an old saying, "this is why we can't have nice things."