Garry Newman acknowledges Gmod successor S&box had a bumpy launch, but is baffled by the number of people complaining about NFTs, which aren’t in the game: ‘I have no idea what this s**t is about’

The newly launched content creation platform S&box has 7,693 Steam reviews and they are decidedly “Mixed,” though it definitely has its defenders. Facepunch co-founder and creator of Garry’s Mod Garry Newman has now directly addressed the situation on the studio’s blog, beginning by acknowledging that “our Steam reviews obviously aren’t great. They’re painful for us. They are showing us where we have made missteps in the release.”

Newman goes on to address some of the common themes in the negative reviews. “Around 35% of the reviews compare the game to Garry’s Mod,” says Newman. “They point out the differences between s&box and Garry’s Mod, they wish it was more like Garry’s Mod. I understand this, they wanted an iteration of Garry’s Mod onto the Source Engine. They didn’t want an engine and a platform.”

While I think everything Newman’s saying here is reasonable, it is also worth pointing out that the first line of S&box’s Steam description calls it “our spiritual successor to Garry’s Mod,” so I’m not enormously surprised that people are buying this with certain expectations. “I don’t think we can win in that argument, it’s going to be an expectation and preference thing,” writes Newman. “My only real hope is that eventually everyone will realise that this is a much better way to work for developers, and we’ll end up with much better content because of it.”

Newman also addresses the frequent complaints about Steam Workshop integration: Gmod allows players to subscribe to Workshop content outside of the game, which Steam then automatically downloads and installs.

“There is probably something in that [functionality], for certain types of mods, and we’ll look into it,” writes Newman. “We have a system in our Sandbox Mode where you don’t need to subscribe to anything. If you want a weapon or an NPC you click on it, and it downloads and spawns it. I guess this appears like we’re shipping all this stuff with the game… but we’re not. Anyone can make these entities and publish them for anyone else to use.”

Newman goes on to acknowledge that complaints about the game’s performance are “a legit grievance, we have the data to back it. We’re working on it constantly, and have made some big strides this week.”

He does however allow himself a moment of legit grievance about certain negative reviewers, such as the “one French guy [who] played for 280 hours after posting their negative review.” Newman also points out that 12% of reviews complain about NFTs: “I have no idea what this shit is about. Of course we don’t have NFTs or blockchain stuff, and never will.”

Finally Newman moves onto what is perhaps S&box’s biggest issue, which is really two linked problems. Since launch there have been consistent complaints about the amount of AI-authored content in S&box, and even before launch Newman told PCG he knew it would be a problem, but believed that “eventually the slop will just fall to the bottom.” The other side of the coin is that S&box is a creation platform that has just launched, and is being compared to one that boasts 22 years of user-generated content (UGC). At the moment, and I’m stealing this joke from PCG’s Andy Chalk, S&box needs time for Us to G the C.

“It’s not our intention to encourage games created using AI,” writes Newman. “It’s not our intention to encourage people making shit no-effort games. But it’s a UGC platform, there is always going to be dog shit. What we need to do is remove obvious trolls, discourage it and make sure it doesn’t keep floating to the top. We are developers and this is our platform. Of course we don’t want it filled with shit.”