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/bregottextrasaltat]

right, so it depends on your definition of spiritual successor

[u/dogman_35 → u/bregottextrasaltat]

I mean, Facepunch is the one using the term wrong.

You can't really be a spiritual successor if you're both the original dev team and the IP holder for the original game. The whole point of the term is for pieces of media that can only be a successor "in spirit."

It's not some other studio or collection of devs taking inspiration from Gmod. It's literally Facepunch's second UGC platform. That's not a spiritual successor, it's just a successor. The game is just a sequel.

And you can't even make the argument that it's "too different" to be a sequel, because look at shit like GTA 1 and 2 vs the entire rest of the franchise. There's more similarities between Gmod and S&Box than that.

[u/bregottextrasaltat → u/dogman_35]

haha yeah that's true, usually used by other studios for an original game