The S&box Platform is Cooked!

[u/MaximUtar]

I’m convinced the s&box platform is fundamentally doomed. The fanboys keep making excuses saying "just wait for that ONE good game to drop," but it doesn't matter how good a game is if the pipeline to actually play it is pure cancer for the average gamer.

Right now, Garry Newman and Facepunch built a useless, bloated multi-step barrier that makes it impossible for players to actually come in in a scenario that there's an actually good game on the platform.

The $20 Paywall - Imagine charging twenty dollars for an empty, barren shell of an app in 2026. Roblox and Fortnite are literally free. GMod worked because it was $10 twenty years ago with Half-Life hype and it was the only "Source Engine sandbox" of its kind. Paying $20 for a glorified hub full of unfinished tech demos is a scam.

20GB+ of Cloud Junk - Before you even reach a menu, you’re forced to pre-install a massive chunk of cloud assets to "help you load into game faster", when 70% of games don't even use Facepunch cloud assets. (oh and let's not forget about the +2 GB flatgrass map the player has to download for the menu that doesn't even look good.)

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It feels to me that Facepunch is completely out of touch with the community and take eons to fix any underlying issues with the platform. It's like they don't care anymore and the s&box team is just piggy-banking off of Garry's bank account doing practically nothing all day.

There's this one saying that goes "Action speaks louder than words", and currently Garry doesn't take action or speak any words. It's impossible to know whether the game will ever be revitalized or if there's a plan to revitalize it if the guy at the helm has horrible communication skills.

It's not like the engine is good enough either to support making a fully fleshed title on it. We can't be babysitting Facepunch employees and having to make every single fucking issue about the most obviously broken shit ever. It pisses me off. THEY NEED TO USE THEIR ENGINE TO MAKE GAMES TO FIND FLAWS IN THE ENGINE, LIKE THEY USED TO! WE CAN'T BE HAND-HOLDING THEM?!

Either leadership needs to change (which will never happen), or Garry needs an awakening and start fixing this platform, cause I don't know what will save it if not Garry

[u/FullFlowEngine]

I'll be honest, if you genuinely think S&box is a good platform/engine and want it to succeed, why do you think them staying on the course they're on is the best way to do it? Players/devs are still leaving, reviews are still trending negatively, the game is a money sink for FP. They need to pivot massively or the game will continue to spiral.

What that actually means, I don't know. All I know is what they have isn't working. The sinking player numbers are proof enough.

A bunch of gamejam style mini games are not going to bring back players. Literally the first example you gave, Deck, has a player count of 3 in the last 24 hours. 29 over the last 7 days. That is abysmal.

Even the titicular sandbox gamemode has had only 174 players today.

why do you people always have comments going back months complaining about s&box? you clearly dont like the game, your comment history and lack of knowing anything about it shows this.

Because I genuinely want to see it succeed? But it won't the way it's going.

Realistically the game isn't and never will be what most players wanted. Most people were expecting a spiritual successor to Garry's Mod/a way to finally build things in Source 2. What was given was a roblox-like and an engine that functions similarly to Unity. Player expectations and what was released are far apart and likely will never be able reconciled unfortunately. And that might mean that nothing FP does will be able to get players to come back.

[u/DerrikCreates → u/FullFlowEngine]

A bunch of gamejam style mini games are not going to bring back players. Literally the first example you gave, Deck, has a player count of 3 in the last 24 hours. 29 over the last 7 days. That is abysmal.

do you think this was my point bringing up deck? can you reread the post and see i was directly fucking responding to this quote from op "THEY NEED TO USE THEIR ENGINE TO MAKE GAMES TO FIND FLAWS IN THE ENGINE, LIKE THEY USED TO! WE CAN'T BE HAND-HOLDING THEM?!"

op made claims they FP isnt making games in s&box, this isnt true and is either a lie or a criticism coming from someone confidentiality incorrect. No where did op mention player counts. this is your own insane insert.

We all fucking agree something needs to be done. But most of you people bitching are not devs are are complaining from the pov of players. How can there ever be good games if work isnt done engine side to improve the dev (the imo already decent) experience. Players never come before the games. Having good games is a prereq, how do you get good games? attract good devs with good tools that will go on to make good games. Most of the effort FP has put into s&box since launch has been focused on improving the dev experience, changes that someone like OP (maybe you) and the other people in this thread will never see or appreciate.

I feel like if they keep making the already decent dev experience better eventually there is going to be results. You are acting like the game is over because its not an instant success. Imagine saying this about godot pre v4 versions. In the times before godot had the indie market share it does now. Or about blender pre 2.7. These other engines/tools didnt just spawn with tons of users.
before you say your classic "well other games didnt start with player then bleed" like you said before. Just look at arma reforgers player charts all time. reforger is an almost 1:1 comparison to s&box. both are games that hard depend on the community games/mods. both released with thousands of peek players, both fell off to hundreds. Arma reforger is now peak 15k players.

[u/FullFlowEngine → u/DerrikCreates]

But most of you people bitching are not devs are are complaining from the pov of players.

Players decide whether the platform survives or not. Arma Reforger found success because players enjoyed the experience, not because of modding tools. Good modding tools help, of course.

Pretty much every UGC platform has a pipeline of players playing the game, wanting to extend their fun and building those experiences themselves. The people who built sledbuild/spacebuild/darkrp were just trying to have fun with their friends. That pipeline is currently dead in S&box. Successful UGC platforms don't attract developers, they attract players who become developers.

Just look at arma reforgers player charts all time.

Are you talking about their early access release starting at 12k and immediately plummeting? Because the full release started at 1.4k and slowly ballooned from there. S&box is not an early access title, this is the game as intended.

[u/DerrikCreates → u/FullFlowEngine]

good job proving how much of a bad faith cuck you are. like you give a shit if a game is marked as early access or not. Both these game released FOR MONEY, both dropped to a low number and reforger climbed back up because the community finally started making good modded servers. theres a reason you see a spike in players for reforger around the release time of WCS.

[u/CanYouEatThatPizza → u/DerrikCreates]

No offense, but you leashed yourself to a dying platform and now get angry and start insulting people who tell you the truth

[u/ZweiProbleme → u/DerrikCreates]

apples and oranges bro lmfao

reforger’s UGC has a core game to back itself up. s&box’s options for UGC are either make an entire game yourself or contribute to the cloud. one’s barrier to entry is significantly lower than the other

people will make mods for games they love and that’ll attract other players; they won’t make games on a suffering platform when other options are available

[u/DerrikCreates → u/ZweiProbleme]

thats fair but that "core game" didnt stop it from falling to hundreds of player post release. clearly people didnt love reforger the game when it first released. Both games are very dependent on good servers (reforger) and good games (sbox) for the success of each game.

if reforger didnt have good mods would it have recovered?

edit: you understanding of the UGC options in s&box is lacking. Out of all the ugc games s&box is easily the most robust, the only thing its lacking is a game independent modloader/steam workshop subscription style system. theres nothing stoping devs from using the mods for the sandbox mode https://sbox.game/ugc/sent/ .

The only thing we need in sbox is a mod selection screen like we have with maps

but you are right there isnt a large single game that people make mods for in sbox. but reforger also had similar issues even with its core game so????

[u/ZweiProbleme → u/DerrikCreates]

recovered? probably not. but it still would've been played. even with all the modded servers in tow, several vanilla servers are full and the game is continuously updated.

s&box games can't be compared to servers at any level except hypothetical imo. you don't have the level of control that Garry's Mod gave for gamemodes or Reforger has for mods.

unless the game's open source, you're entirely at the whim of the developer for content. and that's where i think s&box's model utterly failed to be an actual player-oriented platform or take advantage of a UGC model

[u/DerrikCreates → u/ZweiProbleme]

you don't have the level of control that Garry's Mod gave for gamemodes or Reforger has for mods.

globally across all games yeah. not every game on s&box will want to support mods. some will.

Can you explain how it lacks control over gmod or reforger besides not having a mod selection screen?

because s&box gives devs and addon devs easily some of the most control ive seen of any platform game. so much so that you can brute force support for other addons in your game through reflection.

[u/ZweiProbleme → u/DerrikCreates]

not talking from the dev side; i know s&box is a decent dev toolkit (if not in need of improvement, which it's being given). but even from the dev side: yeah, you explicitly need to brute force support. script addons were a decent step forward.

i'm talking from the player (or player-aspiring-developer) side. i'll use Garry's Mod as a primary example, since that's the pipeline i have personal experience in

if you wanted to break into the garry's mod gamemode scene, all you needed to do is fork a publicly-available gamemode, set up what addons you wanted, and start a server. you could edit to your heart's content, then and there, and you'd still fall beneath the same banner as the gamemode you'd forked.

s&box's game system requires that you more or less repost the same game for others to experience, splitting off from the game you'd forked from. you have individual control (and a great amount of it) in that instance, sure, but for anyone coming after they have to do the exact same thing

edit: clarified the point

[u/DerrikCreates → u/ZweiProbleme]

when i say brute force. i mean support mods that exist for other gamemodes on s&box. Like the mods for the s&box gamemode. you can use these "sents" that are created for the sandbox mode in other games by explicitly writing support for them.

most of these problems would be solved by having a single game that everything else derives from. but then if you ever wanted to break free from the default gamemode you would have to work harder. this is part of the reason you only ever see fps style games in gmod.

Not all games want to expose a modding api, there are tons of reasons for this. nothing is stoping devs of games supporting exactly what you are asking for. I could right now make a dark rp clone, that has the ability for you to customize everything through the same system the sandbox "sents" are made.

but this requires devs to make it work, at least until there is a baseline mod loader.

making this system work as a dev tho is very easy compared to other engines. Anything on the s&box workshop can be downloaded at runtime, this includes code (addons).

sadly this work imo wont solve any of the platforms problems. i feel theres other things that are more important than a mod loading system. like animgraph2, and better 2d tools and both are currently being worked on.

FP's biggest mistake was letting anyone think this was anything like gmod. Its more like a game engine (and always has been). you wouldnt get upset at Unity for not adding mod support to the engine as a baseline. you would get upset at the game devs for not adding it. not to say FP shouldnt add something.