A blunt post from Facepunch
Facepunch is making s&box free to play towards the end of the year, six months after the Garry’s Mod successor launched at $10 and $20 tiers. Founder Garry Newman announced it in a blunt post on Steam and the s&box site: “The platform is not well liked, it doesn’t have good retention. I’m embarrassed by our reviews, I am ashamed.”
My idea of a Netflix for games doesn’t work. It’s not feasible. It’s not how people discover games.
Garry Newman, Facepunch Studios
What changed
- Free to play towards the end of the year. Everyone who paid gets exclusive Steam inventory items, with extra for $20 buyers.
- Play Fund becomes an approval system: creators apply and must be accepted. Facepunch has already removed games and maps that didn’t meet the new bar, and wants fewer clickers, idlers and UI-only games.
- Steam Workshop replaces Facepunch’s own backend, starting with maps. Newman says the custom backend has “mostly been a waste of time and resources”.
- Sandbox game gets priority, with more NPCs, vehicles, first-class multiplayer and addon support, aiming for parity with Garry’s Mod and beyond.
- Human player model is now the default, with the cartoony Citizen model removed from the menu and avatar editor.
- Smaller downloads: the 50 most played games shrank 22% in total once republished.
Newman told players that “we’re not selling an engine, we’re selling a game”, and that charging for entry while also selling skins could be “a big turn off”. “We don’t need the entrance fee, we need players,” he wrote, per GamesIndustry.biz.
Facepunch wants the Sandbox game to reach parity with Garry’s Mod and then pass it, with more NPCs, vehicles and addon support. Image: Facepunch Studios, via Steam.
What it means for you
If you own s&box, you keep it and get the inventory items. If you’ve been waiting, the Steam page is still $9.99 today, so there’s no reason to buy before it goes free unless you want those items. Discovery is the bigger change: Newman wants “a platform with the best, most popular games available”, with curation he calls “a very human thing”, after AI made it “very easy to knock out a game”, as Rock Paper Shotgun reports.
