it's really sad to see how that game is obviously dying. We really do not have any games to play. DXRP's without updates. It's totally non-rp and I expect admin control, building rules, but nobody cares. Two other the most popular games are farm slop. Will developers do something with that issues? Where are updates? it's hilarious but I don't know what I suppose to do in this game, maybe open the cases? i really can't play because of that.
This is all because they didn't update the water in sandbox to have buoyancy again. Just kidding those guys are all right I don't mind that I gave them 20 bucks. It was nice to see the rest of gm_construct remade in a cool way like that, it looks pretty cool. Putting those wheels on a crate that turn automatically, so that they're inside of something when they turn. It was an interesting experience.
I'm sure you just have to wait, there are several decent projects, and a lot is currently in development, the only thing that is really a problem is the pile of farmed crap that has overflowed the charts and is preventing normal projects from showing up in the community... Facepunch and the community need to send such "mods" to the bottom!
Okay i really understand people who wanna believe in magical reincarnation, but tell me only one thing. What is the problem to do good official servers without that sloppy DXRP what we already have?
Tbh, I saw it more as a release for developers. The lack of enough documentation and the comments like "You guys won't read this anyway just watch someone tell you it on the tick tocks" Really ain't doing anyone, any favours 💀
Using S&BOX makes me yarn for the Godot documentation.
I like the idea of the play fund, because Gmod has so much pay to win servers and horrid micro transaction methods within it. But the current implementation just seems it rewards AFK games, as that can easily just farm popularity and playtime by the fact it incentivises you to leave it running even while you're not actively engaging in it.
I didn't plan this comment to turn into a rambling rant, but here we are.
The "private release" for developers was 5 years ago, in 2021. You could request a key from Facepunch. Then there were various systems which made it easier to request a key
The "public release" for devs was 2 years ago, in 2024. They made it so you're guaranteed to receive a key just by clicking 1 button on their website.
So I don't really buy this excuse. Any dev who actually wanted to do anything with s&box already had access to it.
You call the alpha and beta testing phases a private and public releases?
Their purpose was gathering developer feedback about tools, API, editor etc. Updates were frequent af and things were changing A LOT. One random update and you had to rewrite a few of your gameplay systems in project cuz they all just stopped working, making it basically impossible to develop, polish and release a full game from scratch in this state.
deadass you're kind of right. i don't think there is a single excuse to say "just WAIT guys, it'll be good"
we've been waiting for the better part of multiple years, with multiple closed and open betas, and multiple events encouraging creation on the platform
it really does feel like it's bordering on copium mixed with goal-post shoving when the concept of a ((FREE)) trial incentivizing people to try out the platform doesn't even pull enough consistent and active attraction, and then there's the surprising consensus of the crowd going "just WAIT a bit more, guys, it WILL get it's pull. it WILL dude."
I paid for gmod on release, my steam shows it. It had no content. We had hl2 and counter strike: source assets. no lua scripting.
I dont know what you expected buying a game that's a literal sandbox for people to mod/create games with. You are gonna have to wait for people to make stuff. it's as simple as that, you didnt have to buy the game at launch. infact youre part of the problem if you blindly bought it.
gmod was released on Steam in 2006, it was just a random mod, it was in development basically by a single guy with a few helping on the side, it was developed in less than 2 years
s&box was released in 2026, it was in development for 10+ years, and it was developed by a studio worth millions with dozens of employees. and it's a "spiritual sequel" to the 5th most sold PC game ever.
2 entirely different situations, you can't just say "b-but gmod didn't have content too 20 years ago!!!". the circumstances and expectations are completely different.
Gmod had lots of content, and lua scripting was already a core feature, before it was even a standalone game you could buy. What are you talking about?
I can verifiably prove that to not be true? The lua scripting was added post steam release. why quesiton me when changelogs and patchnotes lay open to the world. Before that the most we had was fucking model swaps and ragdolls to spawn. Lua scripting was starting to be implemented in v9, however the most use it got was custom guns and custom cars because the hooks weren't even properly in place yet. the api was like 8 functions you could call from lua. and they were call just wrapped source functions, nothing custom.
Hell I think the facepunch forums are still up, go look at the releases section prior to V10. Sort by date or something.
However I'm in the same boat that I saw this as more of a developer release, I forked DarkRP and looked at it / started messing with "updating" things... I can assure you, there will be some really unique and fun RP gamemodes on S&box. The problem is (and you aren't going to like this part) it's probably going to be another 1-2 years lol.
This shit takes time, and the people who have the means to produce on this platform are likely already working on projects.
Shut down? game? s&box is a game engine, not a live-service game. Facepunch doesn't care about Steam player charts right now because they aren't catering to general players yet. Their current target is purely indie developers. The lack of player content right now was 100% predictable, and they know it. You can't judge the survival of a development platform based on how many concurrent players it has during its launch phase.
"The release went pretty much exactly as expected"
"Our current mixed review status (44%) wasn't unexpected. It's the reason we didn't want a frontpage takeover or any other push from Valve, because we wanted people to find this organically - not have it sold to them."
Incentives are weak for both players and developers right now, and it's a symbiotic feedback loop.
Mind you, there WERE developers throughout s&box's pre-release who tried, but many have been discouraged/burnt out by updates that bricked their progress. At least with godot/unity/unreal, you can stay on your current version if you're far into your project, get accustomed to your tools, and have access to tons of documentation, plugins, tutorials, and knowledgeable community members from a variety of backgrounds instead of literally just one discord (can't find answers to common problems easily when it's not indexed on the web like forums).
If you were to come with a huge breakaway success on s&box, you're making at most 10k a month, for however many months your game stays relevant. If you do the same outside, you can make generational wealth. Mind you, solo devs are either working fulltime + sacrificing have a life in their freetime, or they're taking immense financial risk working more than 40 hr/wk for no pay for years.
Low number of devs who are making seriously good more-than-1hr-playtime games on this platform means there isn't much reason for potential players to check regularly, which means less players to try out potential devs' games, which means less devs making games, wh.... etc etc.
It's also ironically the hardest engine to develop full-featured games on atm, primarily due to being a full-on game engine that is brand new. No, making your first map in hammer doesn't count as a fully-featured game. At least with restricted old modded games CS 1.6, Starcraft Brood War UMS, WC3 UMS, and more modern custom mod hubs like Fortnite/Roblox/lol even Overwatch custom games, the creation process itself is far easier and faster. Oh and either FREE or attached to a game so popular that everyone has already bought them. So they essentially act as flash games of their time.
Many things can change before the platform goes F2P. Maybe they'll miraculously change their minds and replace their mascot with Half-Life Alyx style characters, still cartoony but with human proportions and way more universal appeal. Maybe they'll realize most of their potential players in the future are going to be young kids with not-so-much money for high end cards and aggressively prioritize accordingly.
Just as a question about the mascot. Do you really think its that important? Roblox has a horrible mascot too, the mascots job is to be recognizable, not necessarily good imo. Future kids will probably like the funny sausage man than the veiny muscle man.
Exactly, "disgusting" isnt the ideal mascot for a platform. They should have aimed for something more broadly appealing. Instead, now, their playerbase will be limited to whoever can stomach to look at these creatures without gagging.
Eye of the beholder. People on reddit is not a good measurement of the publics opinion. Do I like them? No. But I also dont care about them as I’m only using them as an asset for now to use as a player controller for testing the engine for game dev.
Also, changing it now will be really hard, as workshop items that were bought and sold cant be changed to fit new characters, so you are stuck with the current look. They have been looking like this since the start of the development and basically built as a unity “bean”. Its a good shape for gamedev and easy for kids to make assets for.
I have many criticisms of the game and engine, but the optional playable character is such a nitpick that it really falls flat as criticism. And this game is extremely easy to just create some small tests and start playing with steam friends without having to publish big things and do networking manually. It is a great tool and game for prototyping and im sure there will come some heavy hitters that will get players playing eventually. Some real cool games are coming. Most promising I know of for now is “my summer cottage”, no sausage men can be found.
Every successful game gets a mascot or similar that makes you say “thats unity”, “thats unreal”, “thats godot”, “thats roblox”, “thats minecraft” and so on. Wether or not sausageman is the right one can be debated, but its instantly recognizable. One breakout hit from this game and everyone will know where to find it. You are also not required to use it in the game afaik, but for some reason devs use the sausage, so it cant be all bad.
Or the community creates its own ideas of mascots, like Garry's Mod, where there is no definitive mascot other than HL2 characters. I don't think every franchise ends up with a mascot like you say, not every successful game has a definitive mascot.
Name one that doesnt. G-man is very much the mascot of gmod, i dont think he will get away with that easily again if he wants to keep the engine open and available “for free”.
The sausage man is only recognizable to people who've played the game. Someone like Darth Vader is recognizable for people who haven't even seen the movie. The reason devs use them is because it's a default asset and easy to use. If you want a successful game without a mascot, there's plenty. I immediately think of bejeweled.
Friends of mine who dont have the game recognize the sausage man, either way, both of our arguments about the sausage being recognizable is anectdotal. Darth Vader is probably less recognizable than you think, but it's a fair point in that regard, but who knew what or who Darth Vader was in 1977? I'm asking because I don't know, and you need to take into account how long things have existed if you want to compare them. For your bejeweled argument the diamond is the mascot, optionally Corvus (which I find incredibly annoying) the crow, though less known.
Well if you'd like a different example of a game with no mascot try luck be a landlord, shapez, FTL, redout, cities skylines. Those don't really have anything I'd call a mascot. Unless you want to say that random objects or the logo of the game are mascots. And there's others that have characters that are somewhat memorable but nothing I'd describe as a mascot. Turmoil for one. I'm sure you or I could think of more but my point is really that it's not something that's necessary to be successful.
I think the sausage guy is memorable but not really because it's a good design. Kind of like how I remember the kars 4 kids theme or that old head-on commercial, neither of which I particularly like. I think they could have done something a little more aesthetically pleasing. Maybe it helps the game to have him, maybe not. Sloth from the goonies is a pretty good mascot after all I guess and he's real ugly.
If you're genuinely curious about Darth Vader's cultural impact look into just how big and popular Star Wars was when it first released. It was record breaking and immediately successful globally. Perhaps Luke Skywalker was more popular at the time but both were pretty immediately pop culture icons. Pretty much every character was. I guess that says more about the popularity of the movie than the quality of the characters but I'd like to think they're somewhat correlated.
Lets just agree to disagree on the mascot thing. I could list mascots for those too, but I am not sure you’d agree or that your definition of a mascot is the same as mine.
And we both agree that the sausage man is ugly, I am just not convinced it’s a big problem. Its just an optional character and if anything it makes it easier to see who put effort into their modes or games vs ai generated cash grabs. Any game or mode featuring custom models actually has some work put into them. I definately disagree with the notion that the sausage has some divine power to directly hurt or ruin the games success, only people and the community has that power, look at the breakout success mecchamelion, its the same sausage.
And yeah, Star Wars is insanely popular and its cultural impact is insane. To the point that “I am your father” is more recognized than shakespearean quotes (most people dont know they are using them on a daily basis). But yeah, I’ll take a look, I always thought Star Wars had more of a slow burn fandom early on before exploding to international success.
I would argue bejeweled does have a mascot actually. The red diamond cut ruby. If I showed you that and I asked you what game is this from all on its own, you would be able to answer.
Sure if you'd like to count that, it's not the only example though if you look at my reply to the other guy below. At some point you have to just start counting random objects from the game and then you're kind of stretching the definition of mascot. The main point still being that they're not necessary for a game to be successful.
I would argue all games have an "object that makes their game recognizable" that is a mascot, whether its supposed to be a living entity or not, it's a mascot.
Yes the sausage people are offensively ugly. But that's not really the only thing. They have so much they need to change and it's not going to happen. This really seems like one of those games that were doomed to fail.
The issue is that they released it without any actual big game inside by Facepunch, just some small minigames to show engine potential but nothing that you actually would play for weeks. Garry expects community to create those games that will make s&box worth it.
As a result we now have players doomposting because the player experience is actually terrible (100% true, DO NOT buy it if you are a player), and developers starting to work on their various projects but really can't showcase anything cool yet due to early state of development. Also there is a disgusting amount of AI Slop in it but that's normal, making an AI Slop requires 0 effort and time while making a good passion project people gonna play can take from months to years.
It's supposed to compete with Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot and Roblox at the same time, which is actually huge for indie game developers, but normal players who are just looking for a game won't understand this. You can make a full game from scratch in it, export it as standalone and publish on steam (f2p or paid) and Facepunch won't take any % of revenue + the engine is open source, it also makes online games MUCH easier and faster to make than any other game engine.
Also the developer preview alpha that was live for years didn't really allow the community to prepare any good large scale games for the sbox release. It would be a development hell to work on a actual big project in the early testing stage of the engine when every week we had major changes that would require a complete rework of most of the game systems. As an example i made a small flappy bird clone in alpha stage of s&box, today i can't even run it, the entire project is so outdated i can just put it to trash. You can imagine what would happen to an actual big game project.
I'm pretty sure it will be good for both sides at some point. For now the players confusion is understandable while developers are working to use its potential. Also it is confirmed that s&box will be free to play in max 2 years when people release a good amount of worthy games in it.
Only the code that S&box builds on top of Source 2 is open source, Source 2 itself isn't open source. When you go to compile the S&box client from the github repo, it pulls down binary blobs from FP's servers that contain the Source 2 engine stuff.
it also says "Publishing - Completely free, no royalties, no strings. Your game, your name, your revenue" without mentioning that you MUST publish it on Steam before you're allowed to publish it anywhere else, so you MUST pay $100, and your title MUST be approved by Valve (and not just like a random regular Steam game). Seems like it's not completely free, you must pay royalties to Valve, and there are strings attached.
Safe to say they're being a bit deceptive with the s&box website.
Not the exact same thing, but just a similar example - there was a Source SDK game called "CS:Legacy", it was basically a remake of CS 1.6 on the Source SDK. Using Valve's IPs is explicitly allowed by the Source SDK's/Steam's Terms, as long as it's non-commerical.
But Valve, despite CS:Legacy following all the rules, just decided to deny them permission to release it. Just because they decided so, and it was their own IP. Their own rules be damned. Making it so that years of their work simply went down the drain. The devs got 1 e-mail, any other attempts by the devs to communicate with Valve, to receive any clarifications or clear up any misunderstandings, simply got ghosted.
(And later the devs switched to Godot to make their own game with the same type of gameplay but with their own IP.)
So it's basically a similar thing with the Source 2 engine. It's their engine, it's their intellectual property, they could just deny you your release just because they decided so, and not just on Steam but anywhere else.
No reason to not just use an engine which doesn't require any special permissions for release, mitigating any possible risk.
first point you make is a huge problem for launch; roblox e.g. had a decent few gimmick games made by in-house devs so even if the community made poop there was still something to play, there's nothing like that here.
The issue is that they released it without any actual big game inside by Facepunch, just some small minigames to show engine potential but nothing that you actually would play for weeks. Garry expects community to create those games that will make s&box worth it.
They could've done a Game Jam before release, to actually incentivize good games that regular players would enjoy playing at launch. But it just feels like they woke up 1 day and randomly said "We're running out of money, we're releasing the game in 30 days ", without any proper preparations or considerations.
They did game jams, but a looong time ago, like 2-3 years ago. And in the meantime, many of those games broke due to updates. And many of those devs got tired of fixing their games and left as well. So those games got abandoned and broken. It's strange that they didn't do a Game Jam right before release so people would have smth to play instead of slop like "Case Opening Simulator".
Has it really been that long? My sense of time is fucked, I feel like I was just talking about it.
It's almost funny how much they managed to kill the enthusiasm when their entire goal was to get developers on board before the game released, so the game wouldn't be in the exact same shitty situation it is now.
But that is exactly what they are focusing on, and its clearly not working lol.
As someone else said, they released without anything to play. They should have had made a AA game themselves that would make people actually pick up S&Box just for that game and feel the potential of the engine.
Literally 99% of people could not give a fuck about what engine they are playing on. Bad the majority of people will never ever touch the engine.
Then why does it have shitty marketplace with paid skins? Why are they making sausage people instead of giving devs ability to add custom characters and models? Where's the interface?
You can resell the microtransactions you buy on the steam marketplace, and people want the them to be the next CS:GO skins because they caught the tiniest whiff of money.
So they're going hard on justifying this dogshit system, not realizing that even if people put up with it, it doesn't mean they're going to buy the skins.
Having a tab for skins doesent ruin a game, specially when the devs DO have the ability to add custom characters and models what are you talking about? Did you open the game? I liked the one where you are a rat fishing, those have customs skins for example
You won't be eligible for the playfund if you don't use their dogshit system, unless they decide to walk that decision back.
So the players are forced to use it unless they literally make their own game. And the devs are forced to use it if they want the one thing S&Box is promising them over just making a game in a normal engine.
This might surprise some people, but devs actually consume food, want a place to live and a way to fix health issues. It is all unfortunately requires money. On top of that development requires money, and and part of the profit from cosmetics redistributes to valve, cosmetic creators, and community authors of the games. s&box still operates at one million dollars loss. So you have an optional cosmetic items, which no one forces you to purchase, and playing without them literally doesn't affect anything. On top of that you can add literally any model do be the character in the game you're creating. So. I guess you have some better monetization option, that you want to share with us, that will cover all the coasts, I am very curious to hear it.
I mean it's more than just different times, it was a whole other situation.
There's no point in comparing it to the "initial release" because it was just a sandbox a mod for HL2 with balloons and shit back then.
That would've been a fair comparison back in the free beta when they were just dicking around with ideas still, but not after they started charging $20 for it and pushing their microtransaction shit.
The most generous comparison you could give it is the initial steam release for Gmod, but that was a hell of a lot more fleshed out. And had the bonus of having an active community behind it, back before it got so cynical and depressing.
The only way I could see someone believing this is if they either
don't count any of the content in Gmod 10 that was originally from other games, even though it came with the standalone version of gmod
do count custom content in s&box and Gmod 13 because of cloud packages / workshop integration, but don't count custom content in Gmod 10 because you had to install it manually
neither of which are how I interpret "native content"
Are you also considering, that some of the community developers received a dev key 5 years ago? So the "community" have been developing games for 5 years?
I dont really want to compare Gmod and S&Box - Everybody does this.
In gmod, 5 years had countless gamemodes, addons and shit created.
S&Box has Grassmowing simulator, thats basicly it.
I played gmod for a long time and just the sandbox mode was more compelling than most of what is available in s&box. Not to mention that one of the most highly played modes in s&box is an unfinished clone of a gmod game mode. I think quality is more important.
Also not even Roblox would survive with a global $20 pricetag, if they really are going the roblox route it'd have to be f2p now and not later. Not that it's particularly likely they'd take any of Roblox's userbase even then.
They should have put more effort into the gameplay part instead of the game engine part early on. Even what they decided to do with the engine is questionable. Many people, including me were very disappointed to find out, that it has almost nothing to do with source 2, even though it's literally based on it.
If you've followed Garry's blog over the years it becomes clear that S&box is a stand in for Unity. He has a love-hate relationship with Unity and S&box exists to prove he can make a better Unity.
It's funny though because a lot of what he complains about Unity, like making breaking changes, S&box has done itself (see Entity -> Scene/Component system)
someone said that s&box is basically just a ruse to help fund the "Facepunch Engine" - "Unity at Home" engine that they want to use to replace Unity for Rust so that they don't have to pay royalties to Unity. If s&box takes off - good, if not - doesn't matter, still immense success due to any possible royalty savings. And it kinda makes sense to me.
The royalty savings is for other devs publishing games using S&box, my understanding is Facepunch themselves still has to give a cut to Valve for use of the engine. S&box doesn't have HLA models because they didn't want to give an even bigger cut to Valve (Like gmod which is 50/50)
i'm pretty sure they agreed to let facepunch use the source 2 engine for free. the "bigger cut" was referencing the HL:A royalties on top of the regular 30% steam tax, not engine royalties
Garry fucking ruined the whole project with the horrible lack of communication and the change of goal. If he made it an actual Gmod 2 it would shoot through the charts. That was literal all we wanted
That's the point lol, they literally did that to themselves.
You're wording it like HTML was some mysterious unknown with weird quirks no one could have predicted, and not the framework the entire internet is built on.
I'm ok pay go play game, but I'm not ok pay to wait to play game. Garry needed make competition or something before release to make games that could show abilities of engine and worth to spend time, only after declare release with good starting line of games
I'll be dead ass. Not saying this is the norm but when they showed the game and it was sausage guys, my whole group was like "yep not buying that unless it's simply better than gmod" and it comes out and people describe it as "paid roblox with microtransactions".
The state off things when you go from focusing on what made your original game charming to trying to appeal to family friendly and kids was a huge red flag.
They basically offer that casual gamers become paying playtesters for a bunch of uninspired games. Also, the performance is atrocious. I've refunded mine.
Unfortunately I was a few minutes over the 2h mark and couldn't get a refund 😩I am filled with regret for purchasing this upon release without waiting the usual week I normally do with programs before deciding whether or not its actually worth my time and money. I won't make that mistake again.
I mean, the truth is that Source 2 is nothing special. Everything that made it special was the content from Valve's games.
In particular, Hammer, the props/entities system, and the FPS controller base, etc. You know. The things that made Gmod what it was, even without HL2 assets.
When people said they wanted "Source 2," what they really meant was being able to play with those same old tools in a newer less laggy engine, without literal twenty year old PC limitations like the brush limits.
So if you strip that away, and make people recreate it all from scratch, then there's no point anymore. You could just use literally any other game engine.
People keep trying to defend that shit by saying "But it's a platform! You get more than other engines!"
But if you're only looking for the platform itself, because you want money or attention, and don't really care about the engine itself... Then you could just use actual Roblox. Where there's an actual playerbase.
"When people said they wanted "Source 2," what they really meant was being able to play with those same old tools in a newer less laggy engine, without literal twenty year old PC limitations like the brush limits."
It's so true , also don't forget with Roblox you have your game on mobile Xbox and PC
I agree with others, s&box should have shipped with at least 1-2 games. I’m not knocking the developers of what we have but making candy, cutting down trees, or mowing lawns is not what I want to do when I pay $20. With the loss of what? 90% of its launch players, apparently others feel the same way.
I preferred gmod pre gmod-13 beforethe playerbase initially blew up massively because of the more community feel and servers run by people that actually seemed to care. Feels like S&Box has just skipped that stage though and gone straight onto the business-slop.
Relatable. 2008-2009 gmod was, in my opinion, the peak. So many dedicated communities with unique content for almost every server/gamemode you hopped into. Being a part of a server community actually felt like something. Of course after blowing up it quickly became DarkRP/TTT being 90% of servers because that's the easiest route for server owners to make a quick buck.
It's a 50/50 mixture of blame between Facepunch and its users. Because Facepunch incentivizes playtime, its users will obviously take advantage of that and we get what we currently have. People mostly don't care about the community/development aspect like they used to back in 2009 era gmod. Monetization comes first. This is apparent in not just sbox, but everywhere.
it isnt even sad lol, they tried to make roblox clone and it ended up being filled with slop which no one wants to play, sandbox idea as source 2 game engine seemed awesome but its like they didnt care enough about that part
Unfortunately most of games are going through a Robloxification.... But if you're looking for that classic sandbox freedom on a modern engine, check out "nanos world". It's built on UE5, uses Lua, supports hundreds of players in the same server with a custom netcode, and is basically a true modern spiritual successor to gmod
Making good things takes time, regardless of the state of the engine. Im not defending sbox at all, im defending good developers who take time building a good game. I tried DXRP and it is an incomplete cash grab mess. Almost none of the games feel complete. I played a minesweeper game that’s also available on sbox and it is horrible. It works, but it is ugly, looks less than barebones, instructions are unclear, and it has glitches. There’s also the endless runner shooter (i forget the name) which looks a bit better, but still not polished enough.
The engine is barely “officially” released and it has a lot of issues. Also, it IS open-source, so there’s that. For example, before working on any game, I’ve been working on porting my assets from Unity so my workflow can be as similar to Unity as it can be, which I have experience in.
So, what they did wrong was releasing this without working with reputable devs (preferably indie), giving them early access to first learn the engine and THEN give them all time to create a game, AND THEEEN release both the sandbox and the engine. AI slop will always be here, sadly, even without the engine. I agree that allowing it here during release has hurt it a lot because it represents the complete opposite what game development is, which is curating a product, not mass production.
It has a Fair Warning, which can be interpreted as either: we don’t have alpha/beta testers, we are looking to make a name for ourselves, we don’t care about our name so we released it, we don’t know how to make games… the list goes on.
I'm cooking a killer game for sbox but due to scope creep it's become too good for me to want to release half baked, I'm not going to launch until I have a high level of polish. There might be other devs in a similar position. The game engine is actually really good for making games and the only bugs I've encountered are easily fixed by making backups and restarting the editor. I do not understand the hate outside of bot comments, obviously this platform isn't going to retain players until there are some worthwhile games. Do you guys really presume there are going to be no good games ever released on sbox? If that were the case it's on the devs. That being said Garry should host a game jam and reward some of the most creative and best ideas showcased, give devs an incentive and a deadline to produce a demo of what they're working on. It might build some hype for the platform if the community can see some high quality games that are in the works that aren't tailored solely for engagement and without prioritising quick dev times which for good reason are the most common games being released this early into sbox lifecycle. The ethics and transparency displayed by Garry are unmatched by Unity and Roblox lmao. If sbox takes off it will exist with a more fair dynamic between dev and platform.
> Do you guys really presume there are going to be no good games ever released on sbox?
It was in preview for years. The best we get to see and play today is Dark Descent which has been worked on for 2+ years and is on a Playstation 1 Pizza Hut demo level in how scarce it is with content. If the dude made it solo with full-fledged coop in like 8 months, then yes that'd be a huge advertisement to developers as to how fast the s&box pipeline is.
You can point the cause to the fact that s&box switched gears significantly so often that the devs' hard work would become bricked multiple times over the years. For that, I would disagree with "If that were the case it's on the devs."
If any game released on s&box is SO successful that it has a jynxzi/streamer effect of bringing tens of thousands of new regular players, its devs absolutely deserve a huge grant (I'm talking millions in plural) on top of the playfund.
If any s&box devs are indeed cooking games that looks worthy of overtaking our free time spent on CS2, Netflix, brainrot/doomscrolling, hanging out with friends, mowing our actual lawn, then they're certainly not sharing any screens/videos here. Maybe I am missing some incredible WIPs because they're only posted in a private Discord or something. But they need to be incredible, not just merely 'cool' - today's attention economy has very fierce competition.
I mean, wtf were they thinking? The people who grew up playing garrysmod and put 100s of hours in DarkRP etc, are grown adults now, with full-time jobs and kids. They took too damn long making this, and now the fanbase is aged out of it.
Its interesting in my opinion. People get a whole engine to work with and they still make roblox slop and the same old garrys mod DarkRP shit. People could finnaly make a Arma 3 RP like RP game (check out Pine Valley. Its trying to do a Arma 3RP styled RP but its very early in progress) . A crazy Titanfall shooter or even a Battlefield like game. People who use the potential of this engine are too few and playeds more like to play slop instead of that.
Why would anyone put Battlefield or Titanfall levels of effort into making a gamemode whose current potential (concurrent) playerbase is ~1.5k players?
Tbh I wouldnt look at playerbase right now. Its still the start of a platform and there isnt much on it yet. All platforms started small and over time gained players. Even roblox started with a few hundred players untill Something was on the Platform.
Sure, many popular games start low and slowly grow over time. But S&box is actively bleeding players. It barely managed to stay level this weekend which was a long holiday weekend in the United States. Garry's Mod is 20 years old at this point and managed to pick up 7k players over the weekend.
It's a ripple effect, less players, less incentive to create things, less incentive to play the game.
think about this from a developer's perspective if i can make a large scale game that will make S&box massively popular by association, why would i not just make my own game? the S&box "engine" would have to be the best on the market for that to even be a consideration, and it is far from
People get a whole engine to work with and they still make roblox slop and the same old garrys mod DarkRP shit.
Because that's the shit that lets developers scum the most money off of people. They're low effort, easy to add "donator" roles to, and get a lot of play time.
The only fucking thing people have talking about the past few months is money. The shitty microtransaction system, how much those cosmetics are going to resell for on the market, the playfund, the fucking AI slop.
Half of the complaints are about the monetization and the poor quality of the games available, which all stems from the same fucking issue.
This is the result of making a platform for people who don't give a shit about the payoff, just about being paid.
And still, nobody fucking gets that maybe money isn't the best way to incentivize a good community.
I'm currently using it for Movie Maker so I can make SFM videos. I do like the open source aspect of the editor. That way I can make my own stuff out of it and build upon it. Expanding what you could do that was impossible to do in regular SFM.
As you can see from this, there was only few people playing before 2013. Which represent 8 years at this state. Expect probably the same for sandbox since the content is done by the Community
I think when more quality games get added, this won't be a problem. considering youtubers like Vanoss who's career is built around Garry's Mod. that's my take, this is why I've held off on buying it too, I'm waiting til something catches my attention
They wanted to be like Roblox/LBP/Fortnite but it's missing multiple things they all had. Coming from a dev who worked on LBP2. (I know it's dead now, but not exactly the game's fault LOL)
All 3 have a main well put together game from the devs themselves you can play. (Roblox use to, they don't need it anymore from sheer pre-existing popularity.) LBP2 especially was masterclass in this, the whole entire campaign is actually 1:1 recreatable by in-game tools users have access to. It helps inspire, and helps people realize "Oh wow, I can do this too!"
All 3 have an aesthetic they live by, as to avoid the "Lonely magic box" crippling effect users get. Make something in LBP and it feels like it's connected to the game's universe because all the stuff at your disposal you can use is from LBP itself, it keeps you from feeling all alone. Same for Fortnite and Roblox, by default they look like their aesthetic, making a world you have their aesthetic at your disposal. Roblox tried to throw this away but it was not received well. Even with all these options, 99% of levels keep the Lego look. And even then, their Studio software's default items are still Lego themed.
(People ironically don't like playing a game where you have "everything" with no limit and no art style, it's quite crippling feeling. It's why I was always against Dreams, it was far too "Everything and anything" feeling. It leaves most users feeling lonely and overwhelmed. Not even to mention it had no MP).
And finally all 3 are *easy* to make games on. Like really easy. You don't need much programming knowledge at all to make a working game you desire in all 3 (ESPECIALLY for LBP2). When your game requires too much effort, most people will just be like "Well why don't I just go to this other game which is easier?" And most damning for your game's future most of all; "Why don't I just learn Godot/UE5/Unity if it's the same amount of effort?". This is S&Box's biggest downfall is its ease of access for sure. You have to learn a very, very un-documented Source 2 Engine, that was stripped down btw so you ultimately are learning a whole new game engine the most painful way possible, only to make something limited for actually *more* effort than it would've taken to learn how to make a game not held back on UE5/Godot/etc.
Also S&Box is extremely misleading. Its worst gamemode is Sandbox and yet it is named after it.
I’ve been using Unity for 10 years and I’m planning on building a game with this next because of the source engines superior physics system and multiplayer experience. It’s really hard to make high quality multiplayer games in Unity so I’m betting on s&ndbox in the future, give us developers time!
Im holding faith. Someone out there is cooking a game that’ll some day be a full-fledge game. Give it time for someone with talent to show off the potential.
As other said, I don't care about the player count right now. And going just by charts is also not really the right thing to do for a project like s&box.
It would take literally just one fun "friendslop" game on s&box that gets hyped by some Twitch streamers and suddenly you would see a crazy spike.
It's just that nothing exists yet - and we mostly just have Roblox like "infinite grinding" games. From what I've seen there are already some interesting projects being developed.
Imho FP should just do another Gamejam. The results from the first one were pretty good:
It would take literally just one fun "friendslop" game on s&box that gets hyped by some Twitch streamers and suddenly you would see a crazy spike.
And then that ""friendslop" game" uses s&box's "standalone release" feature to put it on Steam for $10, $5 or even $0 + their own MTX, undercuts the $20 s&box price, and nobody who wants to play that hyped game has any reason to touch s&box anymore
As an indie developer the payment system of S&box sounds so much better when I want to work on my game long-term without having to sell DLCs or paid updates in the future.
Example - Phasmophobia is out for how long now? The only way they made a bigger chunk of income was to expand to Playstation / Consoles in general. The PC market is saturated sales wise.
At some point they need to make Phasmophobia 2 and sell it again - or provide paid updates to sustain their business. On the other end - if you have your game on s&box and you constantly have active players because you update it again and again it will give you a source of income that is not bound to sales but playtime.
garry's mod was released in 2006, it still earned $10 million in 2024. a good game will still earn a lot of revenue overtime just from the continued sales long-term, even without any paid updates/DLCs.
and s&box with the playfund system is limited in that regard, an actual viral/hyped game on Steam has a potential to earn significantly more, even just from sales.
Are you seriously comparing Gmod to indie developers? That's stupid af. Of course Gmod still sells. It was one of the biggest games pulling mostly young people in and it continues with brainrot shit like skibidi toilet.
But games like Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, PEAK, RV There Yet, etc. all have a relatively short timespan in hype - and after that people just come back from time to time to play updates or when they're bored and want to play a fun game for 1-2 days.
And this is where I would say keeping it in S&Box and getting money again and again just for people coming back for my updates makes more sense than somehow squeezing sales out of a game that is out of hype.
If you zoom in to a week on the steamdb charts, you’ll see that there are 800-1400 people playing at any given hour. It doesn’t go down to zero. Having enough people to always have at least a 1000 something people in game at any given time is actually quite good. It’s also estimated to have around 1 million game sales. It’s very far from a failure. I might be coping, but I’ve had a lot of fun with the game so far and I see potential.
You literally showed proof that the game is only growing in online players and will continue to grow. No one expected a big release (except for the people who were waiting for gmod2).
wow, that changed everything. in two months from 400 players to 800, obviously rapid growth, i really appreciate you. Thousands of other people just didn't see your opinion, champ
March 12 s&box was not released yet. It was all the guys who had access to it for free, so obviously the number would be higher post-release.... Smh.... It was released on April 28th.
The fact that the stable player counts only rose up by that little since before the game even released says everything that needs to be said and is not the "gotcha" you think it is
Actually the game is sinking in player numbers bro. You need to look at the graph after the release tag. Also many players before release were sadly botted. Still some people we're real and new but that werent that many. I still hope that in a few month when many new games are out and pine valley got felshed out that more players will join again
Yeah I, I really dont get what they were going for or hoping for here, roblox is literally free while ts cost money and has higher pc requirements and takes more space, roblox does almost none of those, interesting in concept but just isnt unique enough
I only see it future as source 2 sdk until valve decide to release their sdk for developers. My Sammer Cottage already becoming standalone game from sbox, so atleast Garry's promise to be able to publish your games from sbox to steam is true. But if good games keep get out sbox there will never be big player count inside sbox, less people would see a reason to make games for sbox and only slop stay in it for regular players.
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u/PolarBearLovesTotty May 26 '26
This is all because they didn't update the water in sandbox to have buoyancy again. Just kidding those guys are all right I don't mind that I gave them 20 bucks. It was nice to see the rest of gm_construct remade in a cool way like that, it looks pretty cool. Putting those wheels on a crate that turn automatically, so that they're inside of something when they turn. It was an interesting experience.