329,970 copies of Rust have been refunded on Steam, totaling $4.3 million

Added sales stats to our backend today. These are Rust's real Steam Refund figures. pic.twitter.com/IhjUsJUN9NJune 28, 2017

Garry Newman of Facepunch Studios, developer of Rust, reported on Twitter today that the 329,970 copies of the Early Access survival game have been refunded on Steam. According to Newman (in another tweet), that comes to around 6% of all copies sold. (Extrapolating from that, it appears Steamspy's estimation of 5,509,983 Rust owners is pretty close to the mark.) In terms of dollars, those refunds total an eyebrow raising $4.3 million USD.

It's probably not quite sensible to look at the $4.3 million as a straight-up loss of revenue. Since Steam began allowing refunds of games played for fewer than two hours, customers have presumably become much more cavalier about purchasing and trying games, knowing there's a safety net if they decide they don't want to keep them.

I asked Newman via Twitter what the most common reason given for requesting a refund was, and he replied "Not fun followed by bad performance - which is pretty fair I think."

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.