Rust Developer Is Reportedly Forced To Spend $500,000 A Year On Unity Services

November 1, 2024

Key Takeaways

Facepunch Studios is reportedly being forced to spend a minium of $500k a year on an unspecified game engine company’s services, according to CEO Garry Newman.
Garry’s Mod was built using the Source engine and was published by Valve, making Unity the most likely suspect, the game engine used to make Rust.
This is currently unconfirmed, though the company’s previous scandals, such as the vastly unpopular runtime fee policy make it an extremely likely candidate.

Garry’s Mod and Rust developer Facepunch Studios has claimed that “a certain game engine company” has started forcing the studio to spend a minimum of half a million dollars a year on services. This is according to Garry’s Mod creator and current Facepunch CEO Garry Newman, who claimed via his personal Twitter account that he had a recent call with this mystery game engine company about this new policy change.

Given that Facepunch Studios only has two massively successful games under its belt, actually narrowing down this game engine company is a relatively simple affair. Garry’s Mod was built using the Source engine, the same engine that Valve uses for all of its titles, while it was also published by Valve too. The chances that Valve is behind this problem seem extremely unlikely.

Rust Developer Is Reportedly Forced To Spend $500,000 A Year On Unity Services

That leaves Rust, the second of Facepunch’s popular titles, which was built using the Unity game engine. That name will probably ring alarm bells for pretty much anyone that’s been intimate with game development over the past few years, as Unity has made several extremely unpopular decisions in the past that it constantly had to go back on due to severe backlash.

One of the most infamous examples of Unity being Unity was its attempts to introduce a new runtime fee that would see developers charged based on how many times their games were downloaded. The policy was met with extreme backlash, with many developers announcing the possibility of delaying their games in order to switch engines, fearful that the fee could bankrupt them.

It didn’t take long for Unity to apologize for the policy, after facing an overwhelming amount of backlash, and the entire thing was only just scrapped earlier this year. Despite those plans not going ahead, Unity’s reputation managed to hit an all new level of rock bottom, and many likely still hold a distaste for the engine entirely. Potentially forcing developers of successful games to spend a minimum of $500,000 on their own services wouldn’t be all that surprising to many.

To be very clear, we don’t know the full story about this seemingly new policy, which doesn’t appear to have been made public by Unity on any of its social media channels or official website. Newman’s tweet is also fairly vague, only really complaining about how he feels like he’s being unjustly punished for the success of his studio’s own game. We don’t have the full picture just yet, though Unity skeptics will probably be braced for the worst.