Garry Newman says Facepunch got S&Box wrong. The would-be successor to Garry’s Mod is losing money, struggling to keep players and rebuilding the ideas it launched with. From the sausage people to a storefront drowning in slop, we look at what went wrong and whether a fairer alternative to Roblox can still work.
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00:00 Garry Comes Clean
01:16 More Than Garry’s Mod 2
02:43 A Launch That Burnt Bridges
04:19 The Sausage People Had to Go
06:17 Good Games Lost in the Slop
09:48 What Gmod Players Actually Wanted
12:16 Can the Idea Still Survive?
Sources:
Greed and Ego. All he had to do was make Gmod2 in source 2, instead he made a sloppy, sausage, paid roblox clone with nfts and paid cosmetics.
shoot for the stars and, like one teacher, you may explode on the path.
bro made roblox but fan boy chum chum gmod
The characters turned me off from it for a bit, but I Was sure that it would be decent enough for me to end up getting it anyways. I came here to see the update because I don't know much about the game. The fact that Gary ignored the poll for the names is pretty damn loud of a choice. EDIT: Respect for the Vanoss crew at 1:23
…So what you're saying is that S&Box's default character models are just the würst?
I might be the only one who actually didnt mind the character design, it was unique and derpy, the customization behind them too was fine, most people dont know you can actually change how u look and toggle the ugly little monster off, I played early access and although it felt hollow and empty, I was excited to see what the community could do, but I think this is where facepunch eat the dirt, they didnt give us actual game modes, if I was behind facepunch id go see what community mods and servers are popping rn in gmod and the ones people love like OG Trouble in terrorist town for example.
They have something on the stove, just need to cook it correctly.
damn this seems really cool. I hope they turn this around.
to slop…. people, dedicated curator people and tags… tag everything. AI used? Tag it AI. Let people to search by tags
I hate the future…. like really, generative AI is a PLAGUE
This game fought extremely hard against the phrase:
"Don't reinvent the wheel"
Catering to the demented children playing games now is an awful idea.
We laughted at Concord for being 40$ in a f2p market and now we need to do the same to this one. Sad
From my basic understanding is that cuz the legacy of Gmod is so big, seeing that it got replaced with a similar model of people that make indie games and people actually like the human mods due to mods as if you look in RP servers, they are all custom mods and yes you can mod it to not have those models but the starting as you open is enough to let people to leave, can say more but I stop here
if he had just imported garrys mod into this new game i would have bought copies of it for all my friends and learned game development just for the fun of it.
I get the complaint but damn it's lowk tiring to see the exact some words bar for bar every video comment, I hope Garry is for real putting down that arrogance and do it proper now as he promised, but it's gonna take time to see and for it to be worked on
I hope they can pull a No-Man's-Sky and turn the whole thing around.
its about a guy named Gary Newman and yet you dont feature a certain song?
The issue I have is us developers were given the game for free to make games for the platform then on launch the game was removed from our library and we were forced to buy the game despite spending hours developing and learning the engine, needless to say me and others I know decided not to buy the game, it wasn’t ready for release and it’s a half baked mess of a “game” platform
The idea of S&box is fantastic. The execution was not.
From what I've seen Garry kept doing whatever the fuck he was doing while ignoring community feedback and now he's running around with his ass on fire, finally admitting that his approach to the project was bullshit.
(I don't know if they did this, but…)
They should have made 5-10 premium first-party games in s&box that would lure people in and/or a bunch of community projects.
Then people would have a reason to play the game, which would lure developers to the platform, who in turn would create better and/or more interesting games.
If they just released the platform with nothing, people are going to rush to trying to be the first big game on there, which means a lot of AI slop…
Please don't put "Big Walk" as your primary example of Friendshlop. There are so many other games that deserve that title more. There's a reason it was advertised to people as a chill out game, not a friendshlop game.
This guy looks like the citizen model. Jeeze.
But I don’t think it should be shut down.
Look at No Man’s Sky. Horrible release, but huge comeback.
I said this before, Garry is or was out of touch, what he claimed S&Box to be, was what Gmod is, Gmod is a perfect bridge between players and developers, go to Gmod now, you can play Call of Duty Zombies on there, you can create zombie maps easily in any map on the workshop, you can use any models or weapons, there are RTS game modes, and so on in Gmod, Gnod now literally has whole game changers in it, and it's getting better and better, the only downside is the engine is old and can't keep up, this is why S&Box could of been perfect, Gmod but in a new better engine, with better tools for creators, that sounds like THE game, but it wasn't, instead it ignored the players and focused to much on developers, It became roblox but worse, it's sausage people were only there because of Garrys spite to Fortnite, they existed out of spite, no one liked them.
S&Box offered nothing to the players, as a dev sure it's really good, like insanely good as an engine, but for the players it's Roblox but worse and that is saying something, there are games on Roblox that look better then S&Box graphics, it's insane, S&Box may have been ground breaking when garry came up with it, but over a decade or 2 has passed and Roblox has been around that whole time, doesn't matter if you had an idea for the wheel before the wheel was made, when someone else releases the wheel before you, it doesn't matter that you thought of it first, no one will buy your shitter wheel since the other one has been out for so much longer and improved. S&Box did nothing to stand out, it didn't need to be Gmod2 but it being Roblox 2 wasn't the answer either.
I feel Garry does not look at Gmod anymore, he doesn't see what it has become with it's mods, right now Gmod has grown beyond what he thought, what it was back when it came out, Gmod IS the perfect bridge between game developer and players, and Garry doesn't see that anymore.
To have a Gmod in the new engine with what it can do, to see the mods in Gmod in S&Box with the freedom they give, would be insane, it would push gaming further, Gmod I can download any game mode, map, character, weapon whatever, I can make a TTT game with hazard weather, where you use foam gloves as weapons, playing as GTA SA characters, S&Box I can't, I just play the slop thats on there, no control, no freedom, stuck to what they give you.
Things to point out wrong in this video:
The sausage people: they were disliked not because "People wanted realistic characters" but because they are ugly, a good stylised character would of been fine, something appealing, but no we got hyper realistic sausage people that were only created because Garry hates Fortnites art style, they were made from spite, and the inspiration for them was old British quiz shows, where the people looked goofy. I'm British but I don't want to play as an ugly ass British guy, it would be like if the Sausage people were Pyrocynical fat fetish characters "Inspired by American shows about health" no one wants to play as that.
The "They were an option" is wrong, the sausage people weren't an option a lot of the time, I set my character to the human, but 90% of games forced me as the sausage people, even sandbox mode made you play as them, if you wanted to make cosmetics, you HAD to make sure you made it compatible for the sausage people, you didn't for the humans, but the sausage had to, players were forced to play them, and they were used in most games if they didn't use their own assets, this made it worse, we was told "It's an option" but no it was never an option, the "Option" was just if you wanted to see the sausage or human on the menu screen, but once you loaded into a game, 90% of the time you was a sausage person.
NoMansSky flopped on launch, look at it now.
they need ai in the game, that u talk to, to make the game
I've followed the development of S&Box pretty closely and saw them take several misteps, which is unfortunate as it could have been successful had they made the right choices.
A lot of what people liked about gmod is the fact that it is intrinsically connected to Valve's games: Half-life 2, TF2, CS, portal. It was awesome being able to mess around with models, props, weapons, maps, etc. of those games. If S&Box had a bunch of Half-Life Alyx NPCs and maps that you can immediately load and mess around with, that would actually improve the sandbox experience. Despite the name, it is actually a really poor sandbox game. The first decision they made was to not pay the license from Valve to have Half-Life Alyx stuff in S&Box, and I think that really hurt them in the long-term.
The second major mistep they took is in removing all of the source 2 from their engine. I remember the description of the game went to "A spiritual successor to gmod made in source 2" to the current description on steam where it's now "a love letter to source 2." Like the hammer editor in the source engine is awesome, they basically completely killed it. Anyone who is used to making maps on gmod would have loved to make maps in the source 2 hammer editor, but instead they're making maps in like a Unity UI that no one wanted.
Then somewhere along the way, they focused too much on making S&Box a platform like Roblox, which was their final mistep. In a way, making S&Box a game engine makes creators much more uncreative compared to gmod. I feel like the limitations of programming in gmod was what lead to the community and gamemodes built around it. Sort of like how Minecraft mods being limited to Minecraft make them very creative or Super Mario 64 ROM hacks after the decomp. I think Roblox-like platforms just never breed good creative ideas. If I'm going to spend 2+ years working on a good high-effort game idea, I'm going to use a well-known engine like Godot. I'm not going to use Roblox studio. S&Box is not a stable engine, no one is going to want to develop high-effort games on it. I recall they made drastic changes to the particle system that removed its source implementation which caused many people to abandon their projects. And if programming S&Box is about the same experience as programming in Godot or Unity, why would I pay money to use S&Box? In terms of games currently on S&Box the only ones you'll find are all short sort of trivial games/clones that aren't all that interesting mechanically, pretty much identical to what's on Roblox. If S&Box was built on an existing base, like Half Life Alyx or a S&Box version of Rust, maybe you can see more people working within those limitations to make interesting creative games.
Maybe don't ignore your entire fanbase when they say they don't want adult roblox.
Rip Garry's roblox
you look like a citizen
They really just need to cut the loss, kill S&Box, and just make the thing people have been asking for for a decade. Garys Mod 2.
I know S&Box literally means sandbox, but to me it always been Shitbox. Especially because of these absolutley horrible character design choices
The charm of Gmod was always in the valve assets and the blank slate it offered. I remember watching my friend shoot a fast zombie with the crossbow on a half life 2 beta map. I installed steam the next day. It’s been 11 years now and I have like 700 hours in Gmod
S&box couldn’t convince someone to get into PC gaming the same way
Netflix for games and it ended up being slop? Sounds like it nailed its vision
it was just full of ai slop from day 1 biggest waste of my money.
So now they can fix everything the community is complaining about, have the ENGOODENING of S&Box and re-release it as Garry's Mod 2. Give a free copy to everyone who created popular games for garry's mod 1 so they might do it for gmod 2
Fans telling gaming companies for the last ten straight years: "Don't you dare start replacing real people and assets with AI slop."
Gaming companies, in their own worlds: "The fans are screaming for us to shove AI everywhere."
Graphs showing the results: 0000oooooo……………._________________________
Executives at the same gaming companies: "I know this looks like massive losses, but an AI company put money into my personal account behind the shareholders' backs, so I truly don't care."
TADA!
So, if you're a shareholder (hahahaha, 0% chance that a gaming corp shareholder with any real power is watching or reading this comment), then it is your duty to protect your own assets and dismantle any corporate executive offices that perpetrate AI against the bottom line. It's a risk that any shareholder in their right mind would consider well outside of the boundaries of safe action. And yet, all these "intelligent investors" constantly get taken to the cleaners by the same nefarious, mustache twirling executives who cause those graphs to go down and the profit to stop before shareholders recoup the executives' golden parachutes. So, obviously the shareholders who are losing money must actually NOT BE LOSING MONEY since they A) are monied, B) which makes them part of The Powers That Be, but C) don't rise up and destroy this corrupt system.
I think the main issue with sandbox is that its ugc focused post ai.
Well, well well, if it Isn't the consequences of their own actions ?
What annoys me is that all the literally had to was just actually make a gmod 2 by having a sandbox but with Half Life Alyx as the base
i bought the game right when it came out and just realized it was worse roblox
11:00 as a fairly new player to gmod I would say gmod falls short in modern gameplay, the servers are kinda limited and the people playing the servers are pretty strange to say the least. I wish there was a newer updated version, I've thought about getting s&box a few times but I just don't really think any video game is worth money anymore so I don't buy but if it's gets listed as free I'll be pretty excited to try it out
Messi 8:49
Games need business models like fish need bicycles.
lol, i didn't even know this game existed.