Garry’s Mod developer Garry Newman isn’t happy with the launch of spiritual successor S&box and its large number of negative Steam reviews, and he isn’t pleased about its recent free weekend, either.
Despite how beloved Garry’s Mod is, its spiritual successor has unfortunately not gone down nearly as well since launch earlier this year. Its biggest problem is the issue with any creation platform – the sheer amount of generative AI slop being fed into the game and flooding it with a ton of crap, in turn making it hard to find the good experiences. Newman has been aware of this since launch, acknowledging the issues, and taking steps to make it less prominent to the average player.
After YouTube creator Eridium posted a video titled “S&box’s Free To Play Weekend Isn’t Enough,” Newman took to the comments to acknowledge and address some criticism toward the game. “There being too much content is a problem,” Newman says, adding: “It’s no good having 20 good games on the platform when they’re swimming in the sea of 500 tech demos and clickers. We’re going to address that, we already have plans.”
These plans include a switch to a Steam Workshop model for games instead of “a system where we show you 200 games and let you choose.”
Newman admits: “The launch was shit. The free weekend was shit. We wanted to float under the radar on launch and build up, but we didn’t.” He adds, “it has burnt bridges and made people angry, it’s given a negative view of s&box, it’s turned the gmod community against it. We can’t get away from that, we fucked it.” The dev continues: “I’m well aware of the situation we have here, and the situation in the past. It’s deflating, demoralizing and embarrassing.”
Another main point of criticism has been towards the character designs, where the main characters look like weird sausages, with a somewhat Mr. Meaty adjacent art style. Newman acknowledges this too, explaining he still likes their appearance: “It gave the game and the platform an identity.” Newman believes “if we were an indie studio making our first game with this character that people wouldn’t bat an eyelid, but because we’re being compared to Half-Life 2 it’s an issue.”
And while he “wanted to keep doing more” with the sausage characters to get them into a place where they’re likable to most, he confirms, “I think I’m done trying now and we’re just going to get rid of it and push the human characters forward.”