Garry's Mod Successor S&Box Had "Sh*t" Launch, Dev Admits
Garry Newman has responded to criticism of the game and revealed plans for its future.
s&box is apparently having its own "No Man's Sky phase." Despite how popular Garry's Mod and Rust remain, Facepunch's new Roblox-like project hasn't received a similar reception, and the game has struggled to win players over more than six months after release, accumulating many negative Steam reviews. The recent free weekend hasn't helped either.
After Eridium, who focuses heavily on s&box content and has even argued that he effectively serves as an unofficial community manager, posted a video titled S&Box's Free To Play Weekend Isn't Enough highlighting the game's issues, Garry Newman himself took to the comments to acknowledge and address some of the criticism surrounding s&box. In his video, Eridium talks about the Citizen "sausage" player character models, the influx of low-quality games, particularly AI-generated content, flooding the platform, a perceived lack of outreach from Facepunch, and more.
Newman agreed that s&box has too much content and says the team already has plans to address it, including a Steam Workshop-style model. He also said he plans to get rid of the Citizen and admitted that the launch and the free weekend were "sh*t". His response is actually quite lengthy:
"I like the citizen, I have liked the citizen, and I will like the citizen. It gave the game and the platform an identity. Some people like it, most people don't like it. I do still strongly believe that if we were an indie studio making our first game with this character that people wouldn't bat an eyelid, but because we're being compared to Half-Life 2 it's an issue. I wanted to keep doing more with it, to try and improve it and get it to a place where it's likable... but I think I'm done trying now, and we're just going to get rid of it and push the human characters forward. I don't like giving up on things, I am stubborn, if there's a problem I want to find an elegant solution. We have obviously dedicated a lot of time and effort into it, so there is a sunk cost fallacy there. It's at the point now where I can see it isn't going to change, and we're going to have fewer headaches if we just switch totally to humans, so we'll be doing that over the next month or so.
There being too much content is a problem. It's no good having 20 good games on the platform when they're swimming in the sea of 500 tech demos and clickers. We're going to address that, we already have plans. We're changing Playfund so it's not incentivizing it. We're going to switch to a Workshop subscribe/install model for maps and games. We've been trying to have a system where we show you 200 games and let you choose – and it's not what people want. Even if there are 50,000 awesome HL3 quality games, no one actually wants to choose that way. That's apparent now, that's become really clear.
The launch was sh*t. The free weekend was sh*t. We wanted to float under the radar on launch and build up, but we didn't. It was crap, it has burnt bridges and made people angry, it's given a negative view of s&box, it's turned the GMod community against it. We can't get away from that, we f*cked it. We weren't ready, and we f*cked it. We know that, you know that, we f*cked it.
We have had conversations about hiring you a few times. The conclusion we've always come up with is that you're more useful to us as an independent. We don't want you thinking you can't make videos like this calling us out. We don't want you to stop holding us to account. We're well aware that you're the only YouTuber that really covers us extensively. I appreciate that, and I'd definitely like to find ways to work together with you in any way we can. But us hiring isn't going to be the one. Message me on WhatsApp, Discord, Steam, or email. I am here on the same internet as you. Just message me and ask questions.
I'm well aware of the situation we have here, and the situation in the past. It's deflating, demoralizing, and embarrassing.
Right now, with AI, it's either the worst time in history to launch a UGC platform or the best time in history to launch a UGC platform. I don't know which one. I do have the distinct feeling that in 10 years' time we'll be looking back at the stuff we do in the next 3 months and either regretting making decisions or regretting not making them."
Following Garry Newman's response, Eridium released a new video detailing what's been changing with s&box, which you can watch below:
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