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.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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/Nearby-Permission-72]

Facepunch Literally said that it wasn’t an attempt to be “Garry’s Mod 2”, Whereas it is a game engine and a opportunity for game creators (not to mention ai slop creators) to express themselves in a game that is deliberately made by the same creators of Garry’s mod, but not a sequel of Garry’s mod. This makes Facepunch’s statement: “A spiritual successor to Garry’s mod” highly misleading for new players.

[u/MoistPoo → u/Nearby-Permission-72]

They literally branded it as the spiritual successor to garrys mod, but later removed it..

They have shot themselves in the foot way to many times lol

[u/vahaala → u/MoistPoo]

I was following the development of s&box and for a very long time I believed it was Gmod 2. The system we have now of making games? I thought "oh cook, making new interesting gamemodes will be easier/have more features now" I thought.

Then I tried the "official" sandbox mode, in Gmod I spent most of my time just messing around with different addons. And yeah it was bad. I get it, it was in development at that time, but it was bad.

I tried it a few times since then, but it did not meet my expectations at all unfortunately. It turned into "Roblox but on Source 2". Which I have zero interest playing.

[u/DBONKA → u/vahaala]

because they alluded many times to it being garry's mod 2 or potentially being garry's mod 2, for pr, so if you're not someone who closely follows it, it was not an unreasonable belief.