Creator of Garry’s Mod Successor Admits Rough Launch and Responds to s&box Criticism

Many players were left unimpressed by the new project.

Facepunch Studios, the developer behind the popular survival game Rust and the sandbox game Garry’s Mod, released a new project this year. S&box was intended to be a new platform game and a “spiritual successor to GM,” but players flooded it with negative reviews. They disliked the character designs, and at launch, they complained about a large amount of AI-generated content.

Developer Garry Newman recently ran a free weekend promotion allowing everyone interested to try out s&box. At the time, he published an emotional statement:

s&box is free to play this weekend… I know you hate it and hate me for enjoying working on it, but now you can try it for free and see firsthand exactly why you hate it so much.

The promotion did not do much to boost the player base, as concurrent player counts briefly rose from the usual 400 to 500 users to nearly 800 before dropping again.

The developer recently spoke about s&box again in the comments under one of the videos about the game, acknowledging the unsuccessful launch:

The launch was terrible. The free weekend was too. We wanted to stay in the shadows during the launch and gradually build momentum, but that didn’t work out. Everything went poorly, it burned bridges, angered people, shaped a negative perception of s&box, and turned the Garry’s Mod community against it. There’s no escaping it: we messed up. We weren’t ready and we failed. We know it, you know it—we messed up.

Many s&box players criticized the character models, comparing them to sausages, and Garry addressed that topic as well:

I liked and still like the [citizen] model. It gave the game and the platform a recognizable identity. Some people like it, the majority don’t. I still firmly believe that if we were an indie studio releasing our first game with a character like this, no one would have batted an eye. However, because we are compared to Half-Life 2 [models from Garry’s Mod], it becomes a problem.

Image source: Facepunch Studios

Garry shared that he wanted to keep working on the old models and improving them, but now he thinks they should use human models instead.

I wanted to keep working on it, improving it and bringing it to a state where people would like it… but I think I give up: we’re just going to drop it and bring human characters to the forefront. I don’t like giving up, I’m stubborn; if there’s a problem, I want to find an elegant solution. Obviously, we’ve invested a lot of time and effort, and in this case, the sunk cost fallacy is at play. Now I see that the situation won’t change, and we’ll have fewer headaches if we switch entirely to [regular] human models—which is what we’ll be doing over the next month or so.

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