Rust Celebrates 260,000 Concurrent Players on Steam

Facepunch Studios director Alistair McFarlane has announced a new milestone reached by multiplayer survival game Rust. In a new Twitter post, McFarlane announced that Rust has seen a new peak concurrent count of 259,646 players on Steam.

“Rust going strength to strength!” said McFarlane, celebrating the game’s latest milestone. “We just beat our all-time CCU, beating Covid and all other significant events.”

McFarlane goes on to celebrate the accomplishment by thanking the game’s players for their support.

“For the past several months, we’ve been hitting new monthly records, this was a huge one we were unsure if we’d ever beat, not unless there was another global pandemic,” said McFarlane. “Huge thanks to everyone supporting Rust. The team have worked tirelessly for the past 11 years on Rust. 2026 will be no different, lots of great things coming.”

Shortly after McFarlane’s post, SteamDB revealed that the game had reached even further heights, garnering 262,284 peak concurrent players. This is the first time the game has seen such player numers since its original early access release.

McFarlane has revealed some more details about Rust throughout 2024, including the fact that the game had more than 5.5 million unique players, with over 40 million hours played across over 325 million game sessions.

Among the updates gotten by Rust over 2024 were the addition of new vehicles like bicycles and motorbikes, a complete revamp of the game’s world map that added new points of interest, the addition of backpacks as new equipment, and much more, including new weapons and quality of life features.

Rust going strength to strength! we just beat our all-time CCU, beating covid and all other significant events.

For the past several months, we’ve been hitting new monthly records, this was a huge one we were unsure if we’d ever beat, not unless there was another global… pic.twitter.com/8U0YD5b8Ez

— Alistair McFarlane (@Alistair_McF) January 2, 2025

Rust has reached 260,000 concurrent players on Steam for the first time https://t.co/Ch1ErdTWUI

— SteamDB (@SteamDB) January 2, 2025