Troubles in the S&Box? – GameFromScratch.com (original) (raw)
Earlier this week we covered the release of Facepunch Studio’s S&Box game engine. This is a spiritual successor to their popular sandbox playground Gary’s Mod. Additionally this time around S&Box is a full blown game engine, using an open source C# layer over top of Valve’s Source 2 game engine. The launch however did not going flawlessly and S&Box is currently sitting with a sub-optimal review score on Steam:
Gary Newman, founder of Facepunch Studios, have posted an in-depth article on the S&Box launch. First off, good news for developers, they have announced that the developer fund (money creators can earn for creating S&Box experiences) has been doubled to $1M annually:
We released yesterday and made a bunch of money and got a bunch of new players, so we’ve doubled the play fund to $1,000,000 a year.
It’s our hope to grow this more over time. We’ll review it in a month to see what we’re able to do.
In regards to the low reviews, they broke it down into 3 different categories of complaints:
Our current mixed review status (44%) wasn’t unexpected. It’s the reason we didn’t want a frontpage takeover or any other push from Valve, because we wanted people to find this organically – not have it sold to them. The main complaints are AI Slop, Performance and This Isn’t Garry’s Mod. Not forgetting of course, our biggest fans got the game for free – so can’t leave a review.
The full article then proceeds to break down each category, what they intend to do about it and to give a bit of a roadmap of the future of S&Box.
Key Links
You can learn more about the state of the S&Box game engine in the video below.