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.