"I’m embarrassed by our reviews, I am ashamed"
Earlier this year, Garry's Mod and Rust developers Facepunch Studios released S&box, a mix of open source game development platform/spiritual successor to their Valve prop-filled physics sandbox. It's not fared well, only earning mixed reviews and being stuffed with low quality AI generated games early doors. Now, Facepunch founder Garry Newman has announced plans for a major overhaul that'll see S&box go free to play.
"I’ve been rethinking what s&box should look like over the past couple of weeks," Newman wrote in an announcement post put up on Steam and the game's website. "The platform is not well liked, it doesn’t have good retention. I’m embarrassed by our reviews, I am ashamed. Listening to all the negative feedback, absorbing, taking it seriously and deciding what we should and shouldn’t be doing. It’s not a big secret that it hasn’t been going well.
"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. So we need to do much much better on the game, we need to shift our focus to what players are experiencing, not developers. Part of this focus is drawing our attention to the Sandbox Game. Giving it parity with the Garry’s Mod version and surpassing it. Showing everyone what the engine can do, adding more NPCs, adding vehicles, offering a first class multiplayer experience, supporting addons and customisation."
Newman went on to acknowledge that the way Facepunch went about setting up S&box as a Roblox-esque hub of user-created games hasn't gone as hoped, something quickly knocked together AI generated games hasn't helped. Though, the developer seems to see S&box's core philosophy in terms of game curation as more of a root cause than the proliferation of AI that's contributed by making it "much much harder" to make sure good quality games float to the top.
"My idea of a Netflix for games doesn’t work," he admitted. "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. That’s not a good experience. People want to find games through recommendations, through active multiplayer games, through watching streamers, influencers and content creators. We have been coming at it from the wrong direction. We shouldn’t strive to be a platform with the most games available. We should strive to be a platform with the best, most popular games available."
So, Facepunch are making a bunch of changes which include swapping out S&box's weird cartoony "citizen" character models for standard human ones, which'll certainly make the game look less Robloxy. The most noteworthy tweak, however, is that it'll be going free to play "towards the end of the year". Newman wrote that this was always the route his studio planned to take S&box down eventually, but the view that attracting more players is more important than earning cash on the door in addition to via in-game skin sales has led them to take that plunge early. "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," the dev added.
Those are far from the only changes planned as part of what Newman and co have branded a rethink of S&box, so it's well worth reading the full post if you want the full picture of everything Facepunch are doing as part of this effort to push the game onto a more favourable trajectory. It certainly has a lot of ground to make up if it's ever to become anywhere near as beloved as GMod or Rust, but Newman certainly doesn't seem afraid to confront missteps he's spearheaded, which is a start.