The developer of survival title Rust, Facepunch, has had to cancel a meetup event at the Game Developers Conference.

The news was announced on Twitter, with the studio saying that it had to ditch the meet and greet due to an "IRL threat" was made and resulted in the event being canned. Specifically, these were "threats to kill."

Speaking to PC Gamer, Rust producer Alistair McFarlane has said that these threats are pretty "commonplace" which is a super depressing admission. Staff at Facepunch and their families have had to "change personal details" due to being doxxed by the community. Unsurprisingly, this "often takes a heavy toll on their mental health." More often than not, this is coming from the cheat community rather than 'regular' players, with McFarlane saying that cheaters "often go to great efforts to target individual staff members."

Overall, he said, this is not representative of the Rust community.

"The overwhelming majority of fans are respectful and supportive," McFarlane said. However, he admits that "there is always going to be a small subset of individuals who engage in threatening and abusive behaviour."