Microsoft bought Mojang yesterday you may have heard something about that. You may also have heard grumblings from some corners of the community that Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson "sold out" by taking the money and abandoning his game and, by extension, his millions of adoring fans to the fickle whims of of a corporate villain. But Garry Newman, the man behind indie darlings Garry's Mod and Rust, says he'd do exactly the same thing if he could, and you probably would too.

Newman pointed out in a blog post that went up shortly after the Mojang deal was was confirmed that everything changes for an indie developer once he starts hiring people to work for him, because you're suddenly responsible for a lot more people than just yourself. Citing the case of Blitz Game Studios, which shut down in September 2013, laying off 175 employees, and then effectively re-launched in November under a new name, he wrote, "Those are the guys you don't want to be."

"I am sure more than the top guys at Mojang became very financially rich due to this deal and that's something that should be admired not seen as a bad thing," he continued. "Long story short, I d have done the same thing. The money is enough to very much take care of all the staff. The game is in relatively safe hands. Mojang s legacy is as a huge success story instead of a one hit wonder. Everyone wins. Can you seriously say you d have done it differently?"

No, Garry. No, I cannot.

It could only happen on PC: Garry's Mod, a seemingly pointless sandbox allowing all manner of ridiculous and perverse experimentation, has managed to sell 6 million copies. The news comes via Garry Newman himself, who managed to drag himself away from mountains of cold hard cash for long enough to Tweet the news.

Garry's Mod originated as a Half-Life 2 mod. It hit Steam in 2006 and, according to figures from April 2013, has earned over $22 million. More than a year later, and since the game went standalone earlier this year, that figure has no doubt increased significantly. As reference, the game had sold a mere one million copies back in 2011.

Along with the new sales milestone Newman provided a platform breakdown for the title. The vast majority sold for Windows, 336,765 sold for Mac and 28,322 for Linux.

As for the future of Facepunch Studios, Rust is still in development, albeit in Early Access, while Riftlight is a newly announced topdown shooter which looks pretty sweet.

 

Garry Newman trolled me. I asked the Garry's Mod and Rust creator to show us his computer setup and he told me, flat out, that he doesn't use a standard PC. Then I asked him to send pictures of the setup and he included male genitalia on one of his monitors. Dude is messing with me.

But when you're Garry Newman, looking in on the ridiculousness of the industry, you can do that. You can see the notion that a game developer should have some hand-crafted PC with a giant case and laugh. You can get an email from someone about showing off your rig and decide to have a little bit of fun. And his rationale for his non-traditional working setup is fascinating.

What's in your PC?
My work PC is a Mac Pro running Windows 8.1.

3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache
12GB (3 x 4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
1TB PCIe-based flash storage
Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

What's the most interesting part of your setup?
Probably the fact that it's a Mac Pro. It looks like a bin.



What's on your desk?
Mac Pro, 2 Apple Displays (connected via thunderbolt), a phone that I never use and a printer.

Do you have a gaming PC?
No I don't have a gaming 'PC'. The Mac is probably more powerful and sexy looking than any gaming PC I could build. I've never had any problems with performance. PC manufacturers have kind of got it wrong for 10 years when designing gaming PCs. I don't want a computer that looks like a motorbike, I'm not 12 years old. I want a PC that doesn't look out of place in my living room. I don't want to have to lock it away in its own room.

At one time I did build a smaller PC with a smaller case, but it was always a struggle to fit everything in, and even then everything was quite loud.

Even though I use a Mac I don't use OSX. This kind of makes me a sinner in both camps. PC users hate it because I'm using a Mac (even though it's just a PC) and Mac users hate it because I'm using Windows.

Blur added to obscure giant Rust penis.

At home I have an iMac with Windows installed. OSX has a tool built in to let you easily install Windows. It's not running emulated, it creates a partition and you boot into it. I have one wire coming from my computer, and that's plugged in the wall to power it.

The only disadvantages to using a Mac are the price and the fact that you can't really upgrade them (except for memory). To me this isn't a big deal because I'm rich as fuck so I'm more likely to just buy the latest model instead of trying to get 10fps extra in BF4 by upgrading the graphics card.

My days of taking my PC to bits to make it faster are over. In the same way that I don't take my TV or fridge to bits and change components. This stuff doesn't interest me. I just want to use it.

What are you playing right now?
Banished.

What's your favorite game and why?
Ever? My favourite game ever is probably Black and White 2. I don't know exactly why but it's a game that I return to and play through at least once a year.

Mr. Newman also sent a picture of his "PS4/XBone/Steambox desk" for inclusion:

You may have noticed some strange behavior in Garry s Mod if you played it a couple of days ago. An exploit that took advantage of the Source Engine s file sending mechanism made it possible to send files with any extension to the client or server. Strangely, this was used to change users Steam name to VINH'LL FIX IT, and using them to spam friends and players with the word cough over chat. The exploit is mostly fixed now, but Garry s Mod s own Garry Newman tells us it could have been a lot worse.
The worm as I understand it was transferred to the client as a dll, then when it loaded it crashed the client, in the hope that they'd join another server, Newman told PC Gamer in an email. When they did it downloaded the server's config file and looked for a rcon password. RCON, or remote console, allows you to control a server remotely. If it got one, it infected the server by uploading the dll and running it (it didn't need rcon to upload the dll, only to run it). And then the cycle continued.
Newman said he patched Garry s Mod within an hour of finding out about it, and that Valve did the same, but that it s still possible for the bug to spread via different Source Engine mods, so be careful what you download.
The effects of the worm were mostly non-destructive as far as we know, Newman said. Luckily the creator kept it pretty tame. It could have been a hell of a lot worse. I hope by being proactive and patching it quickly we avoided anyone using it maliciously.

Have you played every single game in your Steam library? No? Neither have I and that accomplishment is apparently just a small sand grain in the over 288 million games in Steam collections that have never felt a press of the Play button. That's a surprising figure from a new report by Ars Technica researching the most active and popular games on Steam straight from the recorded statistics of some of the platform's 75-million-strong community.

Ars' method for its number flood involves sampling registered games and their played hours via profiles and their unique Steam IDs. With the help of a server for computational muscle, Ars randomly polled more than 100,000 profiles daily for two months to pull together an idea of which games see the most time on everyone's monitors. In other words, your Backlog of Shame (don't deny it, everyone has one) probably took part in some SCIENCE at some point. Exciting.

Some caveats exist, though. The data Ars looked at for its research only extends back to 2009, when Steam brought in its "hours played" tracking system. Owned and played/unplayed games are thus slightly skewed to not account for older releases from the early noughties, and any length of time spent in offline mode wouldn't get picked up by Steam either. Still, Ars claims its results deliver a good picture of Steam gaming trends for the past five years albeit with some imperfections.

Predictably, Valve's personal products stack high on the list in terms of ownership and most played hours. Dota 2 takes the crown with an estimated 26 million players who ganked faces at some point in the MOBA, but free-to-play FPS Team Fortress 2 follows closely behind with a little over 20 million users. Counter-Strike: Source rounds out the top three with nearly 9 million players, but it's also collecting dust in over 3 million libraries.

As for non-Valve games, Skyrim wins in activity, barely edging out Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with 5.7 million estimated active owners. Civilization V kept 5.4 million players hooked for Just One More Turn, and Garry's Mod boasts 4.6 million budding physics artists.

Want to know what the most unplayed Steam game is? It's Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, the Source tech demo given free to pretty much everyone on Steam who bought or fired up Half-Life 2. It hasn't been touched by an approximate 10.7 million players. I guess that old fisherman is feeling pretty lonely right now.

My favorite stat is the total of played hours divided by game mode, more specifically the separate multiplayer clients of the Steam versions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops. The single-player campaigns for each respective title sits modestly within the mid-20-hour range, but the multiplayer side balloons well into the hundreds of hours. It's a pretty obvious indicator of where the biggest chunk of popularity resides in FPS gaming, but it's not like you wouldn't get weird looks for claiming you play Call of Duty for the story anyway.

See more of Ars' results in both number and pretty orange graph form in its report.

So far in Rust, I've encountered rock-wielding bandits, malicious architects building one-room death arenas, and a cult of naked men. Poke around the community for a bit, and you'll find more good times in a game with such a sheer degree of freedom. Those flashes of spontaneity are just a small part of why Rust is really cool. Its success is, by now, not a big surprise after a pretty strong early access alpha and taking the top spot for survival RPG player activity, but today marks another notch in Rust's handcrafted leather belt: it's sold over 1 million copies, as tweeted today by Facepunch founder Garry Newman.

As a comparison, it took Garry's Mod a little over five years to hit the same sales milestone since launching on Steam in 2006. More impressive is the fact that Rust is still in alpha, with Facepunch continually tweaking and updating the game as it nears a full release. Rust first arrived on Steam Early Access on December 11.

Last week, Facepunch pushed out a sizable patch that removed zombies from the game entirely and improved animal behavior beyond derp levels. A million sales in almost exactly two months--not bad for a WIP title with a warning line of contains violence and caveman-themed nudity."

We've got our own thoughts on Rust's alpha right here. If you're jumping in for the first time, check out our guide to surviving your first day.

Humble Jumbo Bundle. That's quite a mouthful, and if you say it ten times fast it will summon both Beetlejuice and Candyman and open a portal to the underworld. So, y'know, it's probably best to avoid that. However, it's also the name of the Humble Bundle's latest pay-what-you-want sale, which this time discounts Sanctum 2, Magicka with two bits of DLC, and Natural Selection 2. Beat the average and you'll also get Orcs Must Die 2, Garry's Mod and Serious Sam 3: BFE throw in too. If your bank account wasn't summarily emptied during the course of the Steam sale, it might be worth a look.

That average, at the time of writing, stands at $4.10, so you won't have to fork out much of your pay packet/poker winnings/pocket money to get your hands on those six games. The charities receiving some or all or none of your money this time are Watsi and Child's Play, and there will of course be more games added to the deal over time.

The Humble Jumbo Bundle ends in a little over 13 days.

Being a captain in FTL: Faster Than Light is a nerve-wracking experience. Hostile aliens could teleport onto your ship at a moments notice, an asteroid could take out life support, and you're constantly put in horrible situations with no clear solution. The responsibility is simply too great, but luckily a pair of fellow space-goers are working on a Garry's Mod gamemode that lets you demote yourself to the role of a single crewmember.

The mod, called Final Frontier, is a 3D representation of the cruel—but rewarding—roguelike we thoroughly enjoyed last year. Where your ships systems were easy to control from your tactical view, everything in Final Frontier must be managed by human players. Firing weapons, teleporting players, and unlocking doors requires a quick mind and quicker hands at the correct console.

The developers hosted a Q&A to elaborate on what their FTL-inspired mod entails:

“This game is (heavily (blatantly)) inspired by FTL, a game we all enjoyed playing but felt would be improved with multiplayer,” one of the developers wrote. “Unlike FTL, you control a single crewmember in first-person perspective, and must manually perform the tasks that FTL characters carried out by standing at their posts mashing keyboards. How well you perform your job is entirely dependent on the skill of the player at that task.”

The two modders say they’re only “prototyping the project in Garry’s Mod,” and that they’re only testing it internally, but plan to set up a public server once the mod’s main features are finished. I suppose I could take this time to look for a top-tier crew that’ll fight and die for me without question. Any takers?

Thanks, Rock, Paper Shotgun

Yesterday, we wrote about a mod-management tool called Gmod. As many PC Gamer readers pointed out, its name creates confusion with GMod, fans' loving nickname for sandbox game Garry's Mod. "Isn't that a trademark infringement?" wondered some fans. The confusion has sparked a bit of an investigation, but now Garry's Mod creator himself, Garry Newman, has come forward with some interesting information on the name mix-up.

In an interview with VG24/7, Newman admitted that Olympus Games actually owns the name—and that the name confusion has been a contentious issue not just among gamers, but also between the two developers.

“It’s actually the other way around," Newman said. "They own the trademark for ‘gmod’ and have threatened to take us to court if we don’t other buy it off them—along with all their domains and Twitter accounts—or post a press release pointing out we’re not affiliated, along with a permanent link on garrysmod.com and our twitter, and force the community not to abbreviate Garry’s Mod to GMod.

"Garry’s Mod pre-dates their trademark, as does the abbreviation of Garry’s Mod to GMod. As a bonus our game is called Garry’s Mod—not GMod. It’s only occasionally abbreviated to GMod out of convenience."

Newman feels that the people behind the mod-management tool should've rebranded long ago to avoid confusion, rather than traverse this rocky legal territory now. However, Skylar Kreisher from the Gmod team says there's another side to the story, which we'll be hearing about soon in their next Kickstarter update. We've also contacted Kreisher directly, and will inform our readers if we hear anything back.

Omri mentioned a mod called gmDoom last month, which allows you to bring the Doom experience, including weapons, enemies, HUD, and entities, into Garry's Mod. After watching a few weeks pass as bugs were squashed and updates were released, I decided it was finally time to pull-start this particular chainsaw and take it for a spin. I also decided, instead of just playing around, to really play. Specifically, I wanted to play through the entirety of the Half-Life 2 campaign, using only the gmDoom HUD and weapons. Space Marine, welcome to City 17!

Hm? What? Who? Space Marine is skeptical.

After getting off the train in City 17, I realize how happy I am to be an angry, violent Space Marine instead of a befuddled, bespectacled scientist. Gordon Freeman didn't pick up a weapon until a good half-hour into Half-Life 2, but Doomguy is always packing a pistol, a chainsaw, and his fists. Rather than wandering through the beginning of the game, helplessly watching as citizens are abused at the hands of the Metrocops, I can immediately right some wrongs by applying a healthy dose of SPACE VIOLENCE.

So, when I see a Metrocop shove a citizen, I punch him to death (the Metrocop, to be clear). That annoying flying camera robot gets a taste from my pistol. What's this? Other cops, standing around doing nothing violent? Not on my watch! They die. I approach a couple citizens as well, just to see if weapons work on them too. (Weapons work on them too.) Oh, and that cop who tries to make me pick up a soda can and put it in the garbage? I saved the chainsaw for him.

Marines. Always. Recycle.

Before long, I'm in the canals, fighting enemies who can actually fight back. It mostly works well: the weapons are effective and feel natural after a few minutes of play, though you have to be pretty darn precise with your aim for long-distance kills. It's also a genuinely neat experience: the sights and sounds of the throwback Doom weapons mixed with the atmosphere and enemies of Half-Life 2. It's double-nostalgic. It's like combining two tastes I love, bacon and chocolate, into one violent, historic mouthful of video game.

Something else I notice: while it feels a little odd in this day and age to play a game where you're constantly staring at your own face, it does make your health quite a priority. Instead of a percentage or a colored bar, you get to look at your sad mug streaked with blood, a pretty visceral reminder that it's not your health meter taking damage: it's your own face. Finding medkits feels a lot more urgent when you're hurt so bad your hair is bleeding.

Space Marine needs food, badly.

Ammo for my Doom weapons, naturally, is not stocked in City 17, so I just spawn some for myself from the Garry's Mod menu when I run out. I try to also give myself new weapons when it feels appropriate. When Metrocops start using machine guns, for example, I give myself Doom's chaingun. When I remember that you don't get a shotgun until you get to Ravenholm, I give myself one anyway, because screw that.

After escaping City 17, I wind up deciding to skip the second half of the canal levels. Making a Space Marine drive a crummy boat powered by a fan just seems insulting. It's like making Willy Wonka eat a celery stick. He knows not of, and cares not for, such primitive tools. Fast-forward, then, to Ravenholm!

Plus a quick stop in Black Mesa East to kill a disgusting alien. You're welcome, Vance family!

In the zombie-patrolled streets of Ravenholm, our Space Marine seems quite comfy. Hideous shambling monsters, blood, gore, horror: these are what Doomguy was made for. I admit, I do pine for the Gravity Gun, because flinging giant circular blades into zombies is still awesome. The super shotgun works just fine, though.

These zombies don't shoot back? You got off easy this time, Earth.

After blasting my way through Ravenholm with kindred spirit Father Gregori, I decide to skip the driving sections of HL2 as well, mostly because the driving feels like 100% Half-Life 2 and 0% Doom, and the mix is what's really making this fun. I skip to the lighthouse at the end of the coastal maps, and dig in with the resistance as they fight off the Combine attack.

After defeating a few waves of drop-ship soldiers, I run into a little problem when the Synth Gunship arrives. I've given myself Doom 2's rocket launcher, but it only fires in a straight line, as opposed to HL2's laser-guided launcher. The Gunship doesn't shoot my rockets down, but there's no need: I keep missing because the Gunship keeps moving. Try as I might, I just can't hit the sucker. He, however, has no problem hitting me. It's time to call in reinforcements.

No shame in a Marine calling for backup. SPACE backup.

I use G-Mod to spawn a Doom Cyberdemon-- shut up, that is TOTALLY FAIR-- and the gunship and the Cyberdemon immediately decide they hate each other. (Isn't introducing one enemy to another enemy always awkward, like when your work friends meet your personal friends?) Unfortunately, the Cyberdemon is also unable to hit the gunship. Finally, exasperated, I just take out my G-Mod physics tool and hold the stupid gunship in place, letting the demon blast it to pieces. ALSO FAIR.

Hold still. This will only hurt a lot.

And, having used a physics tool from 2006 to help a cyborg demon from 1993 kill a biosynthetic airship from 2004... that's where my play-through of Half-Life2 abruptly comes to an end. It was a fun experiment, sure, but holding a three-dimensional gunship in the sky with my finger so a two-dimensional demon can whomp on it serves as a massive reminder: I don't just have two great games to play with here, I've got three, and I've all but forgotten about the Garry's Mod part of the experience. I've been eating bacon and chocolate, YES, but I've been completely neglecting the GLORIOUS BOTTLE OF BOURBON sitting right there to wash it all down with.

Time to switch from playing Half-Doom 2 and start playing a game I call Make Everything Fight Everything Else By The Lighthouse For Six Straight Hours!

Combine vs. Heavy Weapon Dudes!

The Combine win!

Pinky vs. Combine!

Pinky wins!

Arch-vile vs. Antlion Guard!

Antlion Guard wins -- but Arch-vile really does raise the dead Doom monsters! Awesome.

Antlion Guard vs. Spiderdemon!

Spiderdemon wins (eventually)!

Helicopter vs. Pain Elementals and Lost Souls!

Draw. Spawned helicopter doesn't seem to ever die, and Pain Elementals never seem run out of Lost Souls.

After making Everything fight Everything Else for six hours, I do, eventually, return to Half-Life 2 proper, mainly to see if I can take down a Strider with a Doom 2 rocket launcher (I can, and quite handily) and to try out the plasma cannon on the Combine (it works amazingly well). And, of course, to unleash the BFG on a store-front full of Combine soldiers.

Looks like the store... *sunglasses* ...is CLOSED.

Putting this mod into that other mod and putting both mods into Half-Life 2 is amazing. Do it! Do it now!

Installation: Mostly simple! However, you'll need a WAD file from one of the Doom games to import all the assets. If you don't own a Doom game, you can use a WAD file from the free shareware version of Doom and still get most of the weapons (I used Doom2.wad; full list of what the various WAD files give you access to here). Drop the WAD in the garrysmod/garrysmod folder in your Steam directory. Then, just subscribe to the mod on Steam Workshop and when you boot up Garry's Mod, it will be enabled. You can spawn all your weapons and monsters from the menu by pressing Q, and enable the HUD using the console code doom_cl_hud 1.

Also, and perhaps this is obvious, but you'll need Half-Life 2 installed for all the Half-Life 2 stuff.