The complaint I've seen several make here is that Facepunch is building Rust around big clans. That's the surface. The reality is Facepunch is catering to cheaters.
A cheater buys Rust, gets banned, and buys it again on a new account, maybe also paying 15 for premium each time. Every ban is another sale. Rust runs about $47 in the UK and about $17 in Ukraine, so where the game is cheapest a ban barely costs anything. A clan running several cheaters at once burns through accounts and replaces them, which makes one clan worth many times what a fair player is worth.
Garry's Mod and Chippy makes very little, s&box is too new to judge but they have less concurrency than a single rust server, and Rust Mobile still isn't out. Everything rides on one game based on their filings. A studio with several products can afford to ban a cheater indefinitely. It seems a studio running on one game can't.
In September 2025, Rust brought in around £88 million, which should have been their best year. Instead they posted a loss, because roughly £38 million went out in a single payment to an entity the filings don't name. That's close to half of what Rust earned. Without it they would have posted record profits. Maybe its shareholder, a vendor, maybe its one time, but we should all be concerned that they lost 2M plus with 88M in revenue. Again, this is speculative, but they could have named the purpose in their filing and chose not to.
In June 2025 Facepunch made that rebuy path official, that was three months before the end of their financial year. There is only one of two things happening here in my opinion, they aren't doing well financially, or they are insanely greedy.
I think direction is FiveM or 2B2T, where nearly every player cheats or hacks the client. Facepunch also hired a developer from the Carbon community who was working on client-side plugins. Carbon is backend, server side by design. Backend isn't where cheating happens. Client is. (C4C)
None of this has to be deliberate. It continues because nobody at Facepunch has a financial reason to stop it. These actions are where a game stops belonging to the community playing it and starts being a vehicle to maximize profit. I'm all for FP getting paid, but if they have to use cheaters to prop their company up or cater to them, its at the expense of every player that isn't cheating and thats fucked up.
Sources: Facepunch Studios Limited (06848626) and Facepunch Group Limited (09346537) annual accounts to 30 September 2025, filed at Companies House.
