•Facepunch Studios has announced it will make S&box free to play as part of a major overhaul of the struggling game, which its founder Garry Newman admits is not being well received.
S&box was released earlier this year as an open source spiritual successor to Facepunch’s physics sandbox Garry’s Mod. It has drawn mixed reviews and been flooded with low quality AI generated games since launch.
“I’ve been rethinking what s&box should look like over the past couple of weeks,” Newman wrote in a post 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.”
Newman said Facepunch had focused too heavily on the engine and development experience at the expense of the game itself.
“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,” he wrote.
The developer also acknowledged that its approach of building S&box into a Roblox-style hub of user-created games had not gone as planned, and that AI generated games made it harder for quality titles to surface. Newman pointed at the curation model itself as the root cause.
“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 मल्टीप्लेयर games, through watching streamers, influencers and content creators. We have been coming at it from the wrong direction.”
The changes include replacing S&box’s cartoony “citizen” character models with standard human ones.
The most significant change is that the game will go free to play towards the end of the year. Newman said this was always the intended route, but a belief that attracting more players matters more than charging at the door led Facepunch to move it forward.
“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,” he added.
S&box faces a long road to catch up with Facepunch’s earlier successes, but Newman appears willing to confront his own missteps in announcing the rethink.
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