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More radical changes beyond just giving the characters necks are coming to Garry’s Mod successor s&box. Facepunch Studios’ game creation platform’s launch in April was met with a swarm of negative reviews, complaints of AI slop filling its user-generated game collection, and swiftly plummeting user numbers.
Now creator Garry Newman is reversing course on some of his decisions, such as pivoting to a ‘greenlight type system’ for user-generated games and announcing that the platform is going free to play much earlier than expected.
“Our focus has been on the engine and the development experience. That’s what we love, that’s what turns us on—but we’re not selling an engine, we’re selling a game,” Newman wrote this week. “So we need to do much much better on the game, we need to shift our focus to what players are experiencing, not developers.”
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That focus, Newman said, will be on improving the sandbox mode for players by adding more NPCs, vehicles, and customization. “I’ve let everyone down that was expecting that. I accept that, and I’m sorry—we are going to do better,” he said.
Another issue Newman addressed is making it easier for players to find quality games amidst the, and I quote, “ton of shit games” Facepunch has allowed creators to upload to s&box.
“The player is overwhelmed by choice,” he said. “They choose a game, it takes a while to download, and it’s immediately shit. How many times will they try games until they find one they like?
“My idea of a Netflix for games doesn’t work. It’s not feasible. It’s not how people discover games. You can’t land people on a menu of 60 games and say, ‘have fun’.”
Game makers who want to participate in the Play Fund pool will now have to apply to the program, instead of the money automatically going to the games with the most maps and players. “Our new policy isn’t set in stone, but generally we want to discourage clickers, idler, slop and UI based games,” Newman said. “We want to set the bar a bit higher than it has been set previously. We’ve removed a bunch of games and maps from the system that we feel don’t reach this new bar.”
s&box is also going free-to-play before the end of 2026: “Everyone who has paid for the game will automatically get a bunch of exclusive steam inventory items (extra if you bought it at $20 vs $10) that I hope will justify the purchase price,” Newman said.
And finally, the sausage character model known as “The Citizen” or “Terry” (seen at the top of this page) has been retired in favor of generic human characters. “The model still exists in the game and so games that use it will keep using it, but it’s no longer visible in the menu or the avatar editor.”
Will those changes be enough to save s&box? Hard to say, but more curation by humans to keep out slop and less simply hoping that “slop will just fall to the bottom,” as Newman told me back in April, certainly seems like a wise adjustment. s&box definitely needs something: When Morgan played it back at launch, it felt like it contained very little of the spirit of the original G-Mod. Hopefully, these changes will help.
