Garry Newman, the creator of the bajillion-selling Garry’s Mod, has not held back when reflecting on his studio’s latest release. The atrociously-named s&box (sandbox, see?) was intended to be the spiritual sequel to Garry’s Mod, the 2008 mod for Valve’s Source engine that went on to sell over 25 million copies. Built for Source 2, Facepunch’s s&box was released in April this year, and was immediately drowned in AI slop and terrible reviews.
Efforts were quickly made to try to fight back against the user-generated AI drivel that was inundating the project, but unfortunately Newman—who is rarely one to find the right side of an argument—went on to add that he didn’t want to ban AI entirely because it’s “a good learning tool and it’s a good productivity tool.” But these adjustments weren’t enough to turn around early feeling about the open source project, which remains stuck on just 47 percent positive reviews on Steam.
Player numbers have been atrocious. While the 20-year-old Garry’s Mod continues to see almost 30,000 people playing simultaneously every day, s&box barely scrapes 500, despite estimates of anywhere between 500,000 and a million sales. Recently, in an attempt to bring in some more players, Facepunch gave s&box (which hurts me to type each time) a free weekend on Steam, and as IXBT Games noticed, this led to Newman’s first outpouring of loathing for the project under a YouTube video’s coverage of the disastrous promotion.
“The launch was shit,” said Newman. “The free weekend was shit.” Blaming its failure to float under the radar for “burnt bridges” (your guess is as good as mine), he added, “We can’t get away from that, we fucked it. We weren’t ready and we fucked it. We know that, you know that, we fucked it.”
These comments have now been followed up by a blog entry on the game’s official site which condemns just about everything about s&box.
“I’ve been rethinking what s&box should look like over the past couple of weeks,” Newman writes. “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.”
The project lead goes on to state that the core mistake has been selling s&box as an “engine and development experience,” forgetting that the people buying it are far more interested in playing. The plan is put simply, and Newman claims is a “relatively easy task”:
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 customization. This is a relatively easy task – but I’ve let everyone down that was expecting that. I accept that, and I’m sorry – we are going to do better.
Acknowledging that AI slop is still making it hard for people to find interesting games to download and play within the sandbox, Newman concludes “my idea of a Netflix for games doesn’t work. It’s not feasible. It’s not how people discover games.” The intention now is to move away from a sprawling menu of confusing choices, and instead to allow curation to rise the best ideas to the top. As Newman puts it, “Where good taste and great opinions are valued beyond everything else. This is a very human thing, this isn’t something that can be replaced by AI, ever.”
The article then goes on to describe the development of Facepunch’s own backend has “mostly been a waste of time and resources,” and instead intends to shift everything over to the Steam Workshop that was already there, already offering the same service.
And finally, the game is going from $10 to “free to play” before the end of the year. “It’s been pointed out that we are charging for access and also have skins for sale. I don’t think that’s too unusual nowadays, but I can totally understand how combined with everything else that it’s a big turn off. We don’t need the entrance fee, we need players.” Those who already paid will get “a bunch of exclusive steam inventory items…that I hope will justify the purchase price.”
Newman concludes,
I love seeing people create things, I love this engine, and I love working on it. The negative reviews hurt me. The disdain for the project hurts me. I don’t like letting people down, especially when they’ve given me money to provide a service. I understand it all and we’re making some big sweeping changes to try to improve things. Please bear with us while we make these changes.
It’s quite the extraordinary mea culpa, and it’ll be interesting if there’s anything that can turn around the fate of s&box at this stage, after such a terrible launch and bewilderingly small player numbers.