Facepunch's Garry Newman: "​I would avoid Early Access like the plague"

pcgamesinsider.biz:

Garry Newman is arguably one of the most prolific developers on Steam. Having set up Facepunch Studios in 2004, the game maker set about working on the massively successful and pretty weird Garry's Mod. Now the team is hard at work on Early Access survival game Rust, among other projects.

We checked in with the developer earlier this year to see how Facepunch is changing, how Newman's opinion of Early Access has changed and what his plans for the future are.

How’s the last year been for Facepunch?

Slow and steady. I want to get Facepunch into a position where we're kind of an incubator for talented game developers. So we evaluated where we are and what we need to do to be more agile, and I started working on a backend system for us.

As we've got bigger one of the problems we found was that we don't know what people are doing.. so this backend aims to make everyone's work more visible to everyone else.

How is Garry’s Mod performing these days? Why do you think the game has had such long-lasting appeal?

Pretty insane actually, it just broke 13m units earlier this year.

It's stayed so popular primarily because of the incredibly creative modding community. Then it's all about streamers. I can pretty much guarantee that every week more people watch it being played than actually play it. Then finally... it's the Source engine - so you can run it on a potato - great performance is a feature.

It's also nice to think that the people in their late teens buying Garry's Mod today wouldn't have been able to even play/buy it when it was released 10 years ago. So because its lifespan is measured in decades instead of months you have this constantly regenerating audience.

What were your expectations of Garry's Mod prior to launch?

At