Rust will leave Early Access after four years, but the developers aren’t done yet

Rust was an Early Access indie survival game before we recognized those five words as a genre, and while plenty of similar games have come and gone from Steam’s prerelease program in the meantime, Rust has remained an Early Access staple since it first released in December 2013. But it’s the end of an era now, since Rust is scheduled for a standard release on February 8.

“We're not planning any big reveals, launch parties, around the world tours or cash prize giveaways for this event,” Garry Newman, founder of Facepunch Studios, says in the official announcement. “We're not going to move staff onto other projects. It's very much going to happen without much fuss. It's business as usual.”

In fact, not much is changing at all for Rust. The game will continue to receive new updates and continued development, but those patches will now be coming monthly. But in addition to the main, stable branch of the game, there will be a somewhat more volatile staging branch where daily additions will be tested. Newman says “don't think of this as us claiming that the game is done.”

One thing that will be changing is price, as it will be increasing from $19.99 to $34.99. Giving prospective players a warning about the price increase is apparently one of the main reasons they’re even announcing the news rather than just quietly dropping the Early Access label.

It’s sort of a strange announcement in the end, since there’s no major demarcation to solidify the jump from prerelease to final product. In fact, Newman asks players “Please try not to compare the game to some other finished game or some idealised version you have in your head. Compare the game now to how it was when we entered Early Access. That's the delta that we feel qualifies us to leave Early Access. Think of it more like we're leaving Prototyping and entering Alpha.”