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."

It's the day after the release of S&box, the successor to the legendary sandbox game Garry's Mod: Reviews are mixed, complaints are plentiful, player numbers are a fraction of Garry's Mod, and Facepunch Studios says in a post-release update that everything is going "pretty much exactly as expected."

"The backend went down once or twice. One time we accidentally DDOS'ed ourselves, and one time we had to scale some services to meet demand," studio boss Garry Newman wrote. "As it usually is in these scenarios, the services that got overwhelmed weren't the ones we had considered at all.

"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."

One of the chief complaints about S&box at this early stage is the presence of "AI slop," which Newman addressed in the update, largely repeating his recent comments: It's not great but it can serve a purpose, and it'll eventually sort itself out anyway.

"AI is the teacher now. It's how people are going to learn how to program from now on," Facepunch wrote. "They're going to be generating their own examples and have it explain the code to them. I feel that outright banning the use of AI is a bad thing, because I'm not worried, I think human creativity is always going to win out."

S&box will never provide a "pointless AI Assistant button" or otherwise lean hard into AI development, but it's not going to ban AI-assisted games either; instead, rather like Valve, it's working to improve the S&box discovery algorithm so "the good games float to the top and the bad games float to the bottom, while offering new, fresh content to people all the time."

Performance is another big issue: Facepunch is working on it, but interestingly it's opting not to make use of many modern rendering technologies. "Most modern engines spread rendering work across multiple frames. Temporal upscaling, temporal AA, amortized GI—it's fast but it all adds up to a blurry, ghosty mess that falls apart the moment you move," S&box developer Matt explained.

"We're not doing that. We render one frame every frame. It should look great in motion, not just screenshots. We're doing forward rendering, MSAA and everything in one frame. This is a challenge, there are problems that are harder to solve, but we'd rather face those challenges than take the shortcuts other modern engines do."

Facepunch also "made a bunch of money" off of S&box's launch day—you can see the detailed breakdown on the studio's finance page, but the headline number is nearly $1 million in one day—and so it's doubling the Play Fund, which is paid out to community developers based on engagement, to $1 million.

"We have development challenges ahead of us but this is what we're here for. This is what we love," Facepunch concluded. "We love it when things break because then we get to fix them. We want the opportunity to show everyone what we can do, we want that fight."

Alongside the update from Facepunch, there's also an update to S&box itself—the patch notes are below.

Today saw the release of s&box, the long-in-development successor to Garry's mod that's also open source and hopes to become a kind of Roblox for dads. There's no denying the potential of this toolkit, nor the commendably generous principles behind why it's been released in the way it has, but it does have one immediate issue. And it's 2026, so of course that issue is AI-generated slop.

S&box's Steam reviews are, at the time of writing, decidedly "mixed", with the vast majority of negative reviews referencing AI in some respect. I've just downloaded the game-slash-platform to have a look and, on the landing page where you can view what's on offer, a lot of the games being offered do look like they've been tossed together quickly using such tools, and have the negative ratings to match. I also don't think I've ever come across a more intriguing game name, in both a good and bad way, than "Terry's Granny (Now with Co-op!)"

I will note that there are roughly as many positive reviews, but here's a brief selection from the negative Steam reviews:

Stiles: "At release there is like 90% AI generated slop which is silently accepted by Facepunch. So you can expect that this platform will be full of AI-generated slop, and Facepunch gladly pays them for doing no work and committing theft."

Babouche: "You will get more fun on transformice than this game full of 'AI slop' and money farm game like on roblox and fortnite."

SomeGhoosName: "It's an unoptimized mess with a 'game hub' filled with 'vibe coded' AI slop, not to mention that the developers themselves support AI in their official discord."

Archupump: "Filled with AI slop and low-effort gambling simulators. If that is something you are interested in, this is your place."

Mado: "Filled to the brim with low quality, asset flip, braindead AI slop which facepunch seems to blindly accept."

I could go on, but you get the idea. Developer Facepunch admits they'll "have to deal with people using AI in obvious, low quality ways" though that's clearly a work-in-progress. The studio's founder Garry Newman acknowledges that s&box "isn't perfect" and says the goal from hereon-in is a weekly cadence of updates with close attention paid to player feedback.

"Low quality, obvious AI-created slop is going to be a growing problem in every creative outlet," Newman told RPS. "We don't encourage using AI to be creative. We don't encourage using AI to create games for you. But we do acknowledge that it's a good learning tool and it's a good productivity tool. We'll be taking action to promote human creativity and push obviously AI-created slop off the main page."

PC Gamer's Chris Livingston sat down with Newman recently at GDC, and the issues of moderation and AI came up. Do bear in mind that Newman was talking shortly before s&box was released into the wild.

"You expect the community to flag it up, basically, with a lot of these systems that don't exist yet, because we're not released yet," said Newman. "My general thing with moderation is you want something to moderate before you create a system to moderate it. So we want people to break the rules, and then we'll notice, and then we'll create a system, and you can apply that retroactively, and you can find the right system for it then: which might be AI, it might be manual review. There's a lot of options nowadays."

As for Facepunch's general stance on AI, Newman said it's a no-brainer that people are going to use it and praises the technology in some respects, while acknowledging the 'slop' problem.

"I don't mind AI that much, because it makes my job so much easier, but I know a lot of artists are more sensitive over AI," said Newman. "I think programmers are over it now. They've seen how useful it is, how more efficient it makes them. My thoughts on AI with programming are basically the same as porn."

Hold up, let him cook.

"So like if you use too much porn, you lose your ability to ejaculate using your imagination," said Newman. "Yeah I think you need to kind of split it 50/50: you need to use your imagination sometimes to be able to do that. I think it's the same with coding. If you count on AI to always do it, then you're going to lose the ability to think critically and do [it yourself]. But I think I've learned more from AI than I've outsourced to it, it's taught me techniques and new things that are way better than anything I've ever come up with on the web or search."

As for whether Facepunch has a codified policy on AI, Newman said the studio uses it in "early pre-production stuff" but he's sensitive as to why artists will feel very differently to coders about it.

"My policy on AI in s&box is I think eventually the slop will just fall to the bottom," said Newman. "Nobody will be interested, because they'll see [through it], but also it's evolving that fast we can't really ignore it, and we can't say don't use AI, because we use AI in our coding all the time. It's useful, it's fast. But for art it's kind of a hot topic, for our artists it's a really hot topic. And I can see the point when it's been trained on their work."

Newman says the use of AI at Facepunch on the artistic side is more of "a replacement for Google Images" than anything which will find its way into the final product, and sees s&box following a similar trajectory to gmod.

"In Garry's Mod we didn't approach it with a plan in mind to make it better, but we knew that while we were making it we'd naturally spot the mistakes that we made," laughs Newman. "Well that I made in Garry's mod, and fix them along the way. And that's kind of what we've been doing [in s&box]."

S&box is available now on Steam.

Original story:

Rust went into full release on Steam eight years ago, but its early access debut goes back to 2013—13 whole years ago. In videogame terms, that means it should've had at least three sequels by now, but so far? Nothing.

Is that about to change? I have no idea, but an all-caps post on Reddit (via GamesRadar) that went up today sure has some fans talking about it.

"RUST 2 IS REAL?!" is as far as the text goes, but it includes an image of an incomplete Steam page that, as far as it goes, is real: You can see it on Steam right now, in all its massacred glory.

RUST 2 IS REAL?! from r/playrust

You can also look at it on SteamDB, which—sorry to say—is where the air starts to come out of the tire.

"SteamDB staff have flagged this app as suspicious, as it may be malicious or impersonating another product," a red-banner warning warns. "We recommend exercising caution and avoiding purchasing or downloading this app."

Casting further doubt: The Reddit user 'Freeqncy' who initially posted about Rust 2 was created just minutes before that post went up. But things get interesting again, because less than five minutes after that, Facepunch COO Alistair McFarlane posted a very terse, one-line reply: "You saw nothing."

Which as we all know is a very implicit warning to people who saw something that they'll keep their noise holes shut about it if they know what's good for them. And coming so quickly after the first went up? As redditor Inevitable_Butthole asked, "Bro why did you make a seperate reddit account to 'leak' this ?"

Ah, but was McFarlane merely messing with everyone on a slow Thursday? "I visit the subreddit a lot, and I sometimes see shit posts and comments that cause confusion," he wrote in a later reply to another redditor. "Now you're all questioning yourselves, is this real? Maybe?"

The fact is that Rust 2 is probably real to some extent: Facepunch boss Garry Newman mentioned it in 2023 as part of his poetic declaration "Unity can get fucked," in which he said "Rust 2 definitely won't be a Unity game."

And while Facepunch isn't known for elaborate teases or ARGs, it does occasionally let big news out of the bag through very indirect means—like when it "announced" the s&box release date in a background Steam page update, for instance. So, confirming Rust 2 by schlepping up a half-finished Steam page? Doesn't seem entirely beyond the realm of possibility to me.

McFarlane himself also has something of a history of saying things of an ambiguous nature: You may recall that in January he offered to buy the New World MMO from Amazon for $25 million. Was he serious? Probably not—but, again, maybe?

20 years after Garry's Mod changed pretty much everything, Facepunch Studios has revealed that the sandbox successor s&box (yes, pronounced "sandbox") will finally launch on Steam on April 28. The news arrived not with a big announcement or flashy marketing push, or any kind of fanfare at all—it just popped up quietly in a Steam page update.

It's nice to have it official, but seriously, a SteamDB update is as close as we got to an official announcement:

The April 28 launch date is more of a refinement than a big surprise, as we've known for a while now that s&box would be out sometime in April. The bigger news dropped last week, when Facepunch announced that it's signed a licensed deal with Valve that will allow s&box users to make games with it, then export them and release them as standalone games on Steam without having to pay Facepunch anything.

There are still details to hammer out—"we need to create a license between Facepunch and the people shipping games, then double and triple check everything is legit," the studio explained in its March 25 update—but getting things sorted with Valve was no doubt the big hurdle in the process. The arrangement will theoretically mean more Source 2 games on Steam in the future, though s&box uses a modified version of the engine.

As for why Facepunch doesn't want to take a cut on the work it enables through s&box (unlike most other parties, for instance, say, Valve), studio founder and CEO Garry Newman recently told PC Gamer's Chris Livingston that he has enough money—which is also why he hasn't sold Facepunch to a bigger outfit.

Newman is also grateful for the opportunities he's enjoyed through Rust and Garry's Mod, and wants to extend that to others as much as possible. "That's my main motivation now, is giving people what I've had, because I think Valve did it for me," Newman said. "And Valve's always like that. They're always like, 'How much money can we make for everybody else?' That's what their hat system is and everything like that. I think we should be the same, because everybody benefits."

s&box on Steam still doesn't have a price listed, but Newman told Chris that it will probably cost $20. Maybe $10. $10-$20, around there.

I got the rare chance this week to sit down with Garry's Mod creator and Facepunch Studios founder Garry Newman, whose next project, game creation platform s&box, is preparing for launch in April.

Among other topics like his original expectations for G-Mod and what price s&box will (probably) launch at in April, I also asked Newman for his thoughts on AI, both in his work and as it relates to the user-created games and content that will appear in s&box.

"I don't mind AI that much, because it makes my job so much easier, but I know a lot of artists are more sensitive over AI," he said. "I think programmers are over it now. They've seen how useful it is, how more efficient it makes them."

Then he said the sort of thing a headline writer dreams of.

"My thoughts on AI with programming are basically the same as porn," Newman said. "So, like, if you use too much porn, you lose your ability to ejaculate using your imagination."

Everyone at the table laughed, myself included—but doesn't he have a point?

"I think you need to kind of split it, 50/50. You need to use your imagination sometimes, to be able to do that. And I think it's the same with coding," he said. "If you count on AI to always do it, then you're going to lose the ability to think critically."

Some early studies have backed this up: a 2025 MIT test of 54 adults showed that those who used ChatGPT while writing essays had lower brain activity and "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."

At the same time, Newman finds AI pretty useful in his work. "I think I've learned more from AI than I've outsourced to it. It's taught me techniques and new things that are way better than anything I've ever come up [from searching] the web," he said.

"So the policy on AI [for user-made content] in s&box is, I think, eventually the slop will just fall to the bottom." he said. "Nobody will be interested, because they'll see it."

As for AI in general: "It's evolving that fast that we can't really ignore it, and we can't say 'Don't use AI' because we use AI in our coding all the time. It's useful, it's fast. But for art, it's kind of a hot topic," Newman said. "Our artists… it's a really hot topic for them. I can kind of see the point when it's been trained on their work."

Garry Newman, creator of Garry's Mod and CEO of Facepunch Studios, sat down at GDC with PC Gamer's Chris Livingston to discuss… well, loads of things, from the history of Gmod to Rust to the imminent release of the studio's new game creation platform, s&box (which will apparently carry a similar price tag to Gmod).

Despite the enormous popularity of its various creations, Facepunch remains independent: which is pretty unusual in an industry where it seems like anything that gets huge eventually gets bought out (Minecraft, PUBG, the list goes on). Surely Newman has had offers for the studio, or even just for things like Rust?

"I don't think I should say yeah," laughs Newman. "Yeah… just before we came out with Rust, we were, what's the word? Propositioned, we were propositioned. By a company close to us, but it weren't enough money, like we considered it, but it didn't offer us enough money."

Was that the only time? "Oh no, a couple of times, but yeah the issue is, with anything like that, why would you sell it?" says Newman. "It's for the money, and I feel like I've got enough money. I don't need that money. And what would I do all day? This is what I would do anyway.

"Like I'm going to get the money and I'm going to end up like Notch, where I'm just back where I was anyway, doing the same thing. So why take the money? Why not just enjoy what I've got and keep building it."

Newman goes on to expand on his point more generally. "I suppose what I would say is the difference, the thing that we've appreciated, what I learned from Rust and Garry's Mod, is that Valve gave me a chance," says Newman. "And it was a big chance, and they took a risk, and it gave me an entire career, like a 20 year career, and more money than I could have ever dreamt of, and more experiences and everything that I could ever dream of."

And Newman wants Facepunch to keep doing the same thing for others. "When we released Rust we did skins, and the community made the money from the skins and stuff, and that's giving people careers, giving things back," says Newman. "Over the years I've spoken to people in the industry, and they've said 'Oh Garry's Mod is how I started, that's why I'm in games now, because of Garry's Mod.'

"To me, that's the best reward from the entire thing. And so that's kind of what s&box is aiming directly at now. We're not trying to make a shit-tonne of money from it. We just want it to be self-sustaining and create this thing where people can create their own careers and wealth from it.

"That's my main motivation now, is giving people what I've had, because I think Valve did it for me. And Valve's always like that. They're always like, 'how much money can we make for everybody else?' That's what their hat system is and everything like that. I think we should be the same, because everybody benefits."

It's clearly a sincere belief, because late last year Facepunch announced that it was going to make s&box open source, and even opened up the finances. As Newman said in rather more succinct fashion at the time:"Valve gave me my chance, I'm already rich, I don't want to fuck anyone over."

Hard to believe, but Garry's Mod has been around for 20 years, and even back in 2006, its $10 price tag made it an easy decision for people who wanted to clown around in the physics sandbox or use it to make their own games to play and share.

Garry Newman's new game creation platform, s&box, is on the brink of an April release, so when I met with Newman this week to chat about the history of Garry's Mod and the future of s&box, I was curious. How much is the new game-making engine going to cost?

Truth is, Newman himself doesn't entirely know for sure. "Did we decide that? I don't know if we decided that," he asked Alistair McFarlane, Facepunch Studios COO, who also attended the interview.

"No, I think we said $20," McFarlane said.

"I think we decided that we're going to charge for it initially," Newman said. "But we didn't decide the price. It will probably be about that."

"Yeah," said McFarlane.

"$20?" I asked.

"$10, $20," Newman said.

"$10 to $20?" I asked.

"Yeah," said McFarlane.

"Yeah," said Newman.

There you have it! It's not the confirmed price, because it sounds like Facepunch hasn't fully decided on one yet, but at least it's an indication that it'll be similarly priced to Garry's Mod—which is pretty incredible considering it's been a couple decades between the original physics sandbox and its spiritual sequel.

It's been 20 years since Garry's Mod launched on Steam, and it's hard to think of a bigger success. The physics sandbox is the top-selling PC exclusive on Steam, is still one of the platforms most-played games daily, and even holds a Guinness World Record—it's the "Most Liked Indie Videogame on Steam."

That's not exactly how Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman foresaw it back in 2006.

"When Garry's Mod released, my expectation was, best case scenario, to make about $30,000," Newman said when we met for a chat this week. "And then [I'd] have to start working on something else the next year."

After six years of development, Newman's game creation platform s&box, a "spiritual successor to Garry's Mod," is set to launch next month. I asked Newman if he thought s&box might match the success and popularity of GMod.

"As long as it can pay its own way, that's what I want," Newman said.

"It's something that we found over the years, that when you enjoy what you're doing and you enjoy the product that you're making, it naturally gets that kind of snowball effect where it brings people in. That's what we found with Rust. That's what we found with Garry's Mod," he said.

"We're never going to release a product where we're like, 'Okay, we've spent $100 million on it. We want to make $2 billion in the next year,'" Newman said. "You're setting yourself up for failure. We'd never do that. So our expectations are always rock bottom."

s&box is due out on Steam in April—though there might be a chance it's not actually called s&box when it launches. In January, Newman polled his fans to see if they preferred other names for the game, and most voted to call it Garry's Mod 2, beating out "s&box," "sparks," and my favorite: "crapbox."

Ever since it was announced, s&box has been carefully described by Facepunch studios as a "spiritual successor" to Garry's mod (Gmod), but not an actual sequel to Gmod. "S&box isn’t Garry’s Mod 2," says the studio. "It’s built to eclipse what was possible before—not just modernise it."

The link can be a bit confusing. Gmod was created by Garry Newman, the founder of Facepunch Studios, and uses Half-Life 2's assets to create a (drumroll please) sandbox environment, within which players can create games and scenarios. S&box has some of the same ideas but is its own game engine and creation platform, with much greater potential for users than Gmod.

S&box is now gearing up for its full release on Steam in Q1 2026, and Newman recently took to X with a poll, saying that "before the launch of s&box we're considering changing the name." This was followed by four options: s&box, garry's mod 2, sparks and crapbox.

The poll is now finished and the results are overwhelmingly in: Garry's mod 2 won out with a whopping 66.6% of the vote, leaving s&box (19.2%) and poor old crapbox (11.4%) in the dust. Sparks, which I actually quite like, earned a measly 2.7%.

I can't help but feel this result is some kind of argument against democracy, and so I asked Newman via DM if he was serious about the poll, and whether we could expect s&box to officially become Garry's mod 2.

"People are dickheads," said Newman. "I fucking love crapbox. I like the self-deprecation stuff, so much better than trying to be big bollocks."

This doesn't explicitly answer the question, though I'm gonna go out on a limb: I think it's unlikely we'll get an official Garry's mod 2, not least because it's always been a point of confusion for s&box. And let's face it, Newman's right. As soon as he put that option on the poll, people were going to be dickheads and vote for it just because, y'know, he's Garry and who doesn't love Garry's mod?

Whatever name it ends up with, s&box is due to launch on Steam in the near future, and late last year Facepunch announced that it was also going open source. It's on Github now and developers can basically do what they like with it. Newman said at the time of this announcement that the studio's trying to create one of those Valve-style ecosystems that can benefit everyone:

"[Valve] did it for me," said Newman. "They could have easily made Garry's mod themselves. They could have taken 100% of that money. They could have given me $100k for the rights. But they didn't, they knew that if you let people succeed it's good for them and it's good for you. Everybody wins.

"Valve gave me my chance. I'm already rich. I don't want to fuck anyone over. I want to give opportunities to the next generation, like Valve did me. We can all win together."

Rust's latest patch may not be as dramatic as its recent jungle update, which added a huge rainforest biome to explore, but it nonetheless makes some important changes to Facepunch's survival sim. The headline update is a party system allowing players to join servers as a group. This makes playing with your friends slightly easier, not only from an organisational perspective, but also because it spawns you into a map together, meaning you don't have to track each other down and risk being killed in the process.

Perhaps the most important change, however, is one players won't be able to see at all. Facepunch is changing Rust's underlying mission system. Missions were added into Rust a few years' back, taking the form of simple, RPG-style quests such as killing specific animals or locating stashes of items. They're not hugely involved, but the rewards they offer are handy, especially during the early game.

Yet the mission roster hasn't expanded enormously since Facepunch introduced the system, and it sounds like the reason for this is they're a pain to make. "We all want to make more missions and flesh this system out but the process to create new missions internally is quite cumbersome and error prone," writes the studio in a Steam post. "Prior to these upgrades, creating a new mission involved a long process of manually setting up conversation nodes, filling in translation fields and lots of manual data entry."

The new system, which according to Facepunch has been "a longer term project over the last few months" automates much of this faff, which the developer reckons will speed up mission creation. "We’re not quite there yet but we’ve got more missions planned this year that will allow us to push these tools further."

These changes coincide with the addition of a new mission, letting players unlock a spawn point at the Outpost location by helping out the Hazmat-suit wearing NPC CZ-721. Facepunch doesn't specify whether this mission was created using the improved tools, but since the system updates aren't fully finished, the answer is probably "partly".

Elsewhere, the update introduces a snapping system for deployables, helping players align deployable objects to walls, corners, and other deployables by holding down left shift. And it adjusts the behaviour of the patrol helicopter that sweeps across Rust's map every few hours. These changes basically make the helicopter easier to chase down if it flees from a fight, in a manner that gives players who initiate the fight a better chance of getting some of the sweet, sweet loot it drops, while also still encouraging serverwide engagement of patrol helicopter encounters.

One last change I want to highlight is Rust's "improved erosion" simulation. This basically creates more realistic scree slopes on mountainsides, which Facepunch says is intended to "do a better job of blending the canyons and lakes with the rest of the environment". Apart from the fact that I simply love a good scree slope (yes, I was that kid who enjoyed Geography lessons at school) it's just a fun example of all the tiny details developers have to think about when making games like this. There's a few images of the system in action below:

Facepunch caps off its update post with a few hints of what else is coming to Rust in the near future. This includes the impending naval update, which has nothing to do with belly buttons and everything to do with letting players build their own boats and then bombard rival players with offshore cannon fire. Beyond that, there's a planned overhaul to AI and animals, a Warhammer collaboration and "more we're not quite ready to talk about yet."

Updated 10/26/25: Garry Newman got back to PCG to clarify some confusion around this, mainly that it wasn't achieved in Garry's Mod. "It was actually in s&box," explains Newman, "not Garry's Mod, someone made a sandbox mod for it and added the achievement."

Original story follows: Garry's Mod is a physics sandbox created by Garry Newman and Facepunch Studios way back in 2004, and in the two decades since release it has spawned countless thousands of mods, memes and gamemodes. Back in 2019 PC Gamer spoke to Garry Newman about the first 15 years, and asked about the most-requested feature from players:

"The biggest thing, by about a million miles, is the 'Played with Garry' achievement," says Newman. "It’s one of the hardest achievements to get on Steam—for obvious reasons."

The achievement is called "Yes, I am the real Garry!" and requires players to "play on the same server as Garry" himself. If you look at Gmod's achievements 2.8% of players have managed to bag this, which still seems relatively high, but bear in mind that many frustrated players have resorted to spoofing encounters or other nefarious means: Because it's hard to play with Garry. 

And in theory, it should be impossible for Garry to play with Garry. Yet Garry Newman of Garry's mod has now achieved "Yes, I am the real Garry" and Steam popped the achievement.

"Finally got this," says Newman, posting a screenshot of the achievement.

The top reply from Yomi is, inevitably, "can you help me get it Garry?" Jaiydanimate is almost plaintive: "u should just give it to everyone at this point bro I been tryin my darndest since 2009."

"That genuinely made me mad," says Tlacitel on the gmod subreddit. "Wait there is more than one Garry?" asks Volt-Off, leading to the inevitable reply from Kgamer404: "Always has been."

There's plenty of speculation about how exactly this was awarded at this point, and I have absolutely no idea. I dropped Newman a line to ask if he was any the wiser, and will update with any response.

Newman and Facepunch continue to work on Rust, which is in incredibly rude health, and the game-slash-platform eventually intended as the successor to Garry's mod, s&box. The idea with the latter is not just improving everything, but giving creators a distribution method and way to monetise their creations that avoids traditional industry fees and inconveniences. s&box is currently available to developers in a preview version.

I might tut tut at the endless, rapacious pursuit of wealth for its own sake that defines our society, but at the end of the day, I still want to know who's making the big bucks and imagine what I'd do with them, baby. Thankfully, The Sunday Times has just come out with its Rich List of the 30 wealthiest figures in the UK games industry.

At the top of the list are Igor and Dmitry Bukhman, whose names, games, and studio I had never heard of before beholding this very list. The brothers founded and own Playrix, a 4,000 person-strong developer of free-to-play mobile games, with their most notable releases being Township, Fishdom, Homescapes, and Gardenscapes. I guess I'm happy for them and their eye-watering £12.5 billion fortune.

Past a metaverse guy and the founder of Candy Crush developer King, now the oft-forgotten third pillar of Activision Blizzard King, you'll run into some rich guys more PC gamers will recognize: Dan and Sam Houser, who lay claim to an estimated £350 million fortune. Co-founders of the niche indie developer, Rockstar Games, their fortune was built on revenue from Rockstar's breakout hits: The Warriors in 2005 and Bully in 2006. Those games' runaway success have allowed Rockstar to indulge in less lucrative passion projects like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption.

The biggest surprise, at least for me, is #6 on the list: Garry's Mod's titular creator, Garry Newman. I guess it shouldn't be a shocker. Garry's Mod is a ubiquitous presence in PC gaming, and despite the name, it's a $10 standalone game. Newman's Facepunch Studios is also behind the highly successful Rust, and his deep pockets have me much less worried about Newman's imminent Skibidi Toilet-related legal battles.

There's a lot to dig into with the 30-person list: PewDiePie is still rich as hell, believe it or not, and I definitely felt my heart warm at the sight of Luca Galante, founder of poncle and creator of Vampire Survivors, at #26. It's a bit of a bummer and not exactly surprising that there are only three women on the list, but I don't know if "more women in the UK games industry 1%" should become our next rallying cry for gender equality in the hobby. One thing we can all agree on though: The people I really like and admire on the list like Galante and Newman are just cool guys with talent who also got lucky, and the rest of them should be paying more taxes.

If you can cast your mind back to around this time last year, you might remember Garry Newman—him off of Garry's Mod, and founder of Facepunch Studios—announcing that "Unity can get fucked" in the wake of sudden, badly thought out changes to the engine's pricing scheme that would have seen devs fork over fees on a per-install basis once certain "fee thresholds" were met.

Unity eventually walked back the most egregious aspects of those changes, but it's probably not surprising that Newman is more committed than ever to his kinda-sorta Garry's Mod sequel/brand new engine s&box, which has been in the works for years now. In fact, Newman spoke a bit about his vision for the engine in a recent dev blog.

"I don't want to pay Unity $500k every year so I can then pay my own staff to optimize and fix their engine," writes Newman, quite reasonably. Facepunch's other game, super-popular survival game Rust, has been based on Unity its whole life, but Newman has already said Rust 2 would be based on a different engine.

"Unity has been good to us," he says, so it looks like bygones are bygones when it comes to those fee changes, "but I regret that we didn't always have our own engine being developed in the background… The long term goal is to be making all of our games on s&box, and to have expanded so the engine works on mobile/console/etc."

So Newman would quite like to stop paying Unity for the privilege of fixing its engine, which makes sense, but he also regrets that "the Garry's Mod community mostly have to leave Garry's Mod if they want to make money from the things they create in it."

Later on, Newman writes that "In Garry's Mod, if you made a popular game, the next step was to abandon the community and make a new version in Unity or Unreal. That fucking sucks."

That means a key element of s&box will be "A Garry's Mod type platform, where there's a list of games and you can jump between them. But this time providing a way for the game developers to monetise." 

Which could, of course, open the floodgates to all kinds of dreadful shovelware. "Everything you download on iOS/Android app store turns out to require a subscription. Every Roblox game is pay to win. We need to do better than that.," says Newman, "Let people make money, but don't let it get predatory."

Which sounds easier said than done, to me, and would probably necessitate relatively strict moderation, but Newman hopes to lead by example. "For this to work we need games that get people sticking around. We're making games that will try to do that, and we'll be making an official sandbox mode too." There will also be s&box game jams to get devs' creative juices flowing.

Plus, Newman promises he isn't just trying to lure disaffected devs into his own financial bear trap. "We don't want the burden of collecting royalties or license fees. The platform and our own games should make us money. That should be our incentive." In what I can only interpret as a jab at Unity, he writes "I would also like to offer some assurance, legally, that we can't change the rules further down the line, when we get jealous about how much money everyone is making."

Which all sounds quite idyllic, so I hope Newman pulls it off. Over the last few years, it feels like the games industry has coalesced more and more around the two poles of UE5 and Unity, with other engines increasingly left out in the cold. 

It'd be great if the engine that is—for all intents and purposes—Garry's Mod 2 succeeded in diversifying a bit, and treated devs better than Unity has been in the process. There's just one thing that needs to happen before Facepunch can let devs "use the s&box engine to create games, export them, give them away for free or put them on Steam," Valve has to say yes.

"We obviously need officially Valve to say yes to this, but Valve are cool, they get it, I don't think they're gonna say no. They just need to know what they're saying yes to—so our aim is to put a demo together and see what we can do." So keep an eye out for that, and if you want to try s&box out now, you can check out its developer preview on its website.

In what you might charitably call an audacious legal move, Garry Newman—he of Garry's Mod fame—says he's been served with a DMCA over none other than Skibidi Toilet, the intensely baffling Generation Alpha meme consisting of a Half-Life 2 character's head beatboxing in a toilet. It was originally made in Garry's Mod and is also in talks to become a Michael Bay movie. This is the world we live in and we're just going to have to accept that, you and me.

Newman revealed the DMCA request in a post on the S&box Discord channel, posting a screenshot in which someone claiming to act on behalf of the Michael Bay-run film studio Invisible Narratives (the one attached to the Skibidi Toilet cinematic universe) accuses Garry's Mod of misusing copyrighted Skibidi Toilet characters like "Titan Cameraman, Titan Speakerman, Titan TV man, and Skibidi Toilet." Driving the point home, the request says that "There is absolutely no licensed Steam, Valve, Garry's Mod content related to Skibidi Toilet."

And what do you know? Look up Titan Cameraman on the United States Copyright Office website, and it has been claimed by Invisible Narratives.

"Can you believe the cheek?" wrote Newman on Discord. He's got a point: Skibidi Toilet itself owes a whole bunch to Garry's Mod. It uses the same Half-Life 2 assets that people have been mucking around with in GMod for years, and creator Alexey "Dafuqboom" Gerasimov credits the GMod machinima scene as a big inspiration.

In fact, Gerasimov himself popped up on the S&box Discord to try to get in touch with Newman. "I did NOT strike Garry's Mod and I'm trying to understand what else is written in the letter!"

Which certainly makes the whole thing seem like a bit of a mystery. It could be, of course, that the upcoming Skibidi Toilet movie—and the rights Gerasimov handed over to Bay and co to make it—have set lawyers aflutter, and GMod has been caught up in that. Or perhaps the whole thing is an elaborate prank.

I've reached out to Newman to ask about his intended response to the DMCA, and I'll update this piece if I hear back. But for now, only Skibidi time will tell.

Eighty years later the shadow of World War 2 still looms large over our world, and remains an enduring obsession for some, but on one thing nearly all are agreed: The Nazis were complete pricks, and any contemporary hint of their ideology and symbolism must be met with the greatest possible pushback.

That's easier said than done, however, because distinguishing between legitimate use of these things (such as representing the Nazis accurately in an entertainment product) and Actual Nazis is difficult. It's not helped by the fact that 'Nazi' has also become a go-to online insult and is often used to describe things that bear little relation to the National Socialist German Worker's Party.

All of which leads us to the most unexpected of places: Garry's mod. The incredibly popular Steam sandbox tool is loved for its flexibility and capacity to create pretty much any experience or scenario creators can come up with. Some of them have come up with creations that involve the Nazis. And drawing the line between what should be allowed, and what should be banned from the sandbox, is a complex task

"I can see merit in the games here where you roleplay survival/war scenarios," says Garry's mod creator Garry Newman in a longform post. "It's engaging + interesting + compelling + educational. Humanity's lows are always gonna be a rich seam for games/movies/tv/books/etc."

Newman acknowledges that this description fits "the huge majority" of roleplay communities, which he says are no more harmful than Day of Defeat or Call of Duty. "In fact in a lot of ways they're much more interesting than that, they explore the politics / diplomacy / humanity / infighting / suffering in ways that other types of FPS can't. We don't really want to police these games."

The problem with overseeing something like Garry's mod, however, is that not everyone is like that, and "lurking in some of these games are a bunch of guys that really seem to love the Nazis," said Newman. "It seems like a few of them really love the Nazis outside of the game too. That creates problems."

Newman says the issue they're grappling with is how to act on this in a way that keeps the good stuff and gets rid of the bad stuff. "We obviously don't want to ban all WW2 themed games, but we do want to get rid of the celebration of Nazis," said Newman. "Maybe outright banning swastikas, heil Hitlers and other Nazi symbolism is the way to go?"

Newman says being a father has changed how he looks at this stuff, considering both his kids play a lot of games, learn lots from them, and so he wonders "what if they get on one of these servers with these nutters. What will they learn? What will come to be acceptable to them?" 

Newman ends with a short FAQ:

They paid they should be allow to do whatever they want

Nope

Freedom of expression

Nope

Being Sensible

I know this ends up being an argument between a group of people with flags emoji in their bio and another group of people with different flag emoji in their bio, and ok, they're gonna turn everything into that argument.

Newman says this is more of a notification to server owners that the game's team have been observing this grey area for a while and are now thinking more about how to deal with it: "How can we work together to stop it becoming something we have to ban?" He is currently running the below poll, which has had just under 50,000 responses, asking if they should just go ahead and ban "Nazi gamemodes". At the time of writing, 73.7% of respondents say yes.

The price of Garry's Mod and Rust are going up in Russia—way up—because of what creator Garry Newman described on Twitter as "opportunism" among gamers looking to take advantage of the Russian ruble, the value of which has crashed as a result of sanctions imposed on the country over its invasion of Ukraine. Newman also pledged to make a hefty donation to charity to support victims of the war.

"We're raising the price of our games in Russia because the ruble has crashed so much and it's leading to opportunism. We're going to donate any payments from Russia to humanitarian charities helping the Ukrainian people," Newman tweeted. "War sucks for everyone, so we're also going to donate another $500,000 to help them all out."

The prices of both games have indeed gone up. Garry's Mod is now ₽750 ($6.40), up from ₽365 (which itself was an increase from ₽249, the regular price until September 2021), while Rust is now ₽3,000 ($25.65), compared to ₽1,465 previously. That price was also the result of a September 2021 increase: Previously it had been just ₽725.

In an email sent to PC Gamer, Newman explained that the increase was made primarily to discourage people from using VPNs to buy his games cheaply, particularly Rust. Harsh sanctions imposed on Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine have driven the value of the ruble down dramatically: Five years ago a ruble was worth just under 20 cents US, which doesn't sound like much but is still an awful lot more than its current value of less than one cent. That means, for example, that prior to the price hike, people using VPNs to make Steam think that they're in Russia could have picked up Rust for less than $13, far below the regular $40 price in North America.

The promise to donate funds raised by Russian sales of Rust and Garry's Mod to Ukrainian charities could make it appealing to Russian gamers looking to quietly oppose the invasion, but Newman doesn't think that outcome is likely. "My expectation is that things will sell less there—not more," he said.

"There are of course many Russians that oppose what their country is doing, but I wouldn't expect that buying our games would be an appropriate way to protest against it. Especially considering Valve is still going to be taking their cut. And especially since they probably are unable to get a working payment method right now anyway."

Russia is facing increasing isolation on all fronts arising from its invasion of Ukraine: Visa and Mastercard have blocked Russian financial institutions, PayPal is no longer accepting new users in Russia, and companies ranging from CD Projekt and Electronic Arts to Microsoft, Airbnb, Spotify, Volkswagen, Oracle, Netflix, Nike, and Boeing have restricted or halted their business operations in the country.

As the name implies, Garry's Mod was originally a Source Engine mod that let the user muck around with that engine's physics, models and props. The mod released in 2004, before spawning a standalone product on Steam in 2006. Now, in 2021, Garry's Mod has sold an astounding 20 million copies.

That's pretty impressive for a game that has no goals, no narrative, no incentives: You just boot it up and stuff around, though players have managed to create some pretty bonkers and brilliant maps, mods and modes in it. According to Garry Newman in our 2019 interview, the game's roleplay potentials are one of the big draws for players. "The roleplay gamemodes are still a huge thing," he said, "but that in itself can encompass a thousand other sub gamemodes."

Despite a kinda-sequel being on the horizon, Garry's Mod sales seem to be accelerating rather than declining: the game hit its 10 million sales milestone in 2016 after ten years on sale. It's taken an additional five years to add another 10 million to that figure. Sadly though, Newman doesn't get a dollar for every copy sold.

As for that kinda-sequel, it's called s&box and it's coming along nicely. Plans to use Unreal Engine 4 have been abandoned in favour of Half Life: Alyx engine Source 2. 

Sandbox, or s&box, is the heir apparent to Facepunch Studios' Garry's Mod. We first started hearing about it again last year, thanks to a meme-y tweet from Garry Newman, but since then its gotten a proper website with real development updates. The latest development update goes quite in-depth, explaining progress on Ragdolls, various sandbox tools like wheels and thrusters, chatboxes, pretty water, breakables, and perhaps most impressively: The sun.

"This month I've started working on an extense time of day system," Newman says in the update. He goes on to detail the graphical changes that the light system allows, like matching shadows on both the player model and what's in the player's hand. There are a lot of great little videos in there, from how ragdolls work to how things are affected by physics and break. And emojis in chat. That's nice too.

We first heard about Sandbox nearly three years ago, when Newman wasn't quite sure that this code would become Garry's Mod 2. And it's possible that it didn't, since the game has switched engines and seen development start and stop several times since then. Garry's Mod is the most popular physics and nonsense sandbox for the original Source engine, and the tale of the total accident that lead to its creation is a fascinating read.

Garry Newman—creator of gleefully chaotic indie physics sandbox Garry's Mod—has been getting up to mischief on Twitter by teasing Garry's Mod 2, but it looks like that's not quite what he's working on. 

While it looks like he's using the Distracted Boyfriend meme to suggest that he only has eyes for Garry's Mod 2 right now, rather than teasing than a brand new game announcement apparently he was referencing Sandbox (stylised as S&box), a spiritual successor to Garry's Mod that was announced in 2015.

Newman told PCGamesN that the tweets were actually about Sandbox, but it's still good news for Garry's Mod fans. In our interview last December, he said Sandbox had the potential to become something like Garry's Mod 2.  Unfortunately, work on it had been "paused", with Newman saying that if development wasn't resumed in 2020 then the game was "probably dead forever". 

So it looks like it's been brought back from the brink, though Newman is still being coy about it on Twitter.

The original Garry's Mod—which celebrated its 15th birthday in December—holds up remarkably well for its age. It receives regular updates (the latest was on March 17) and remains popular with players, still placing high up in Steam's Top 100. Sandbox (alias Garry's Mod 2?) looks set to build on the original's success while adapting to the changes in the gaming landscape since 2004, with the introduction of VR support being the biggest selling point discussed so far.

There's a fun holiday surprise over on the Garry's Mod website called the 12 Days of Garry's Mod. The page displays some amazing Garry's Mod creations, like "Half-Life: Full Life Consequences"—a charmingly awful story written by a Fanfiction.net author named squirrelking and turned into a hilarious and unforgettable short film by YouTuber Djy1991.

You'll also see Ross Scott's comedy series Civil Protection, moody sci-fi drama Shelf-Life Part 1 and Part 2, the gorgeously atmospheric 40-minute long film Haven, and several other notable machinima highlights, all made with Garry's Mod, the physics sandbox created by Garry Newman and Facepunch Studios way back in 2004.

It must have been difficult narrowing the selection down to just a dozen features, considering Garry's Mod has been around for 15 years now. Along the way from free sandbox mod for Half-Life 2 to standalone game on Steam, it's sold millions of copies, it's been used to make thousands of videos and webcomics, and has hundreds of popular mods and gamemodes created by users, like Prop Hunt, Jailbreak, Trouble in Terrorist Town, and more.

The 15 year anniversary is the perfect time to chat about the strange legacy of Garry's Mod, so I fired over some questions via email both to Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman and Valve's Erik Johnson. Here's what they had to say.

Origin stories

PC Gamer: How did you come up with the name?

Garry Newman: You know, I think I kind of actually stole the name, it wasn’t my idea to name stuff after myself. At the time there was another mod called JBMod, made by a guy that went by "jb55." So it made sense that my take on that mod would be called Garry’s Mod—because I went by the name "garry". I probably wouldn’t have named it called Garry’s Mod if I knew where it would end up.

Garry's Mod has been in the top 10-20 games on Steam for as long as I can remember. Tens of thousands still play it every day, but how are sales nowadays?

GN: It sells about 1.5m copies a year, and it’s sold just over 15m copies total. Which is kind of pleasing since it’s also 15 years old. Plus you know, money.

Do you recall when Valve first became aware of Garry's Mod? What were your first thoughts about it?

Erik Johnson: The specific point in time is a little tricky to pin down. I do remember there being a pretty significant, and somewhat underground, mod community that was working off of the Half-Life 2 source code leak from 2003. While having the code for Half-Life 2 out in the wild before the game was finished wasn’t a super positive experience for the team finishing the game, it's pretty cool to see what the mod community could get working with that unfinished codebase. It felt like Garry’s Mod grew right out of that community after Half-Life 2 shipped.

Did anyone at Valve have any idea the Source engine could be used the way it is in Garry's Mod? Are there any tools in GMod that surprised you to see?

EJ: A lot of the identity of the gameplay of Half-Life 2 centered around physics. Even in the early days of development, most of the experiments that people were running had the physics engine at its core. So, on one hand, it wasn’t surprising that Garry started in a similar place that we did. That said, it would have been pretty hard to predict the Garry’s Mod of 2019 back in 2004.

We’ve always been impressed by Garry’s ability to iterate on the game and roll feedback from his community into the game so well. It’s a more difficult process than it sounds, because it really comes down to navigating a constant stream of feedback, but being limited in the amount of time to get everything done. Garry has always been about as good as it gets at picking the right direction to take his game.

What's it like to see the beloved characters from Half-Life and other Valve games being used with Garry's Mod for machinima and comics and videos?

EJ: It’s pretty cool. Part of the process for us in shipping any of our games, but especially the single player ones, is letting go of them once they are released, and letting the community take bits and pieces of them in whatever direction they want to. It will be fun to watch what people build with the editor we’re releasing along with Half-Life: Alyx next year.

Pay to play

Paid mods are (still) a great source of ire among (some) players. When did the idea to start selling GMod on Steam come along? Was it Valve's idea or Garry's?

EJ: It was the early days of getting Steam built, and it was pretty clear that Garry’s Mod had a big (and growing) audience. Our philosophy back then was the same as it is today, which is that we wanted a platform that connected the people who created valuable content with the people that consumed it. It was clear that it was a perfect example of a product that would benefit from this, and so we reached out and asked him if he was interested.

Garry being able starting at building a product that he thought people would like, to where he is today, is the kind of story we’re always trying to make happen. Reducing the friction between the creator of interesting content and the consumer of it has a number of really positive side effects. It’s been cool to see it happen over the past 15 years for Garry and his team.

GN: It was about a year before we started selling it. I was emailing [Valve] to ask about something else and they mentioned that they think it’d sell well. I was like, yeah right, what a dumb idea, it’s already free—why would anyone pay for it? 

As time went by and it kept getting more popular, I thought about things I’d like to reprogram, stuff I’d like to improve and innovate on. I couldn’t justify spending a decent amount of time doing this stuff. Then it clicked that if we were going to sell the new version it could justify spending more time on it and justify people buying it rather than sticking with the free version. So then I had to get on my hands and knees and send an email to Valve where I explained that it wasn’t a dumb idea and can we do it please.

Was the negative reaction [to selling Garry's Mod] worse than you thought it might be, or not as bad?

GN: I can’t remember much of it—it was actually one of the most embarrassing things that has ever happened to me. We’d been working on it in secret for a few months and the community were getting quite worried. They had got used to weekly updates before that. So we decided to announce that we were going to be on Steam and everything was going to be okay. This wasn’t like announcing that you’re gonna be on Steam nowadays, this was when there were about 3 games on Steam. This was a big deal and blew up everywhere.

Then the next morning I woke up to an email from Valve, saying something like "It’s customary to wait until the agreements are signed before announcing." So I’m thinking, fuck, I’ve announced it’s going to be on Steam and now I’ve pissed off Valve—so it’s not going to be on Steam. It took me a couple of weeks to recover from that. I couldn’t enjoy any of the community happiness, I felt like a right knob head. 

How did you settle on the $10 price? After 15 years (sales aside) why is it still $10?

GN: I don’t think I ever contemplated charging more. It was free and now it’s not, the price had to be low enough to people that they’d just be like... yeah sure why not. It’s important to remember that before Steam pretty much no-one bought games on the PC. Everything was pirated. And while Garry’s Mod was a multiplayer game—which offered some protection from piracy—it could be played single player too. It had to be cheap and easy enough to stop people pirating it.

Apart from having money from sales, how did selling GMod change its development?

GN: I think Garry’s Mod would have died 15 years ago if we didn’t sell it. It gave us a reason to continue development. Besides that Steam obviously allowed us to update the game much easier. Previously when it was free you’d download a zip file from my website with the new version in. This would limit the frequency of the updates.

Back then, because Steam was in its infancy, they didn’t have an automated update system. I had to upload the new builds to an FTP and email Valve to make them live. Because of the time difference this could mean that a patch could go out at 4 am my time, while I was in bed. If there was a bug in it I’d be in a lot of trouble when I woke up. But again because of the time difference I wouldn’t be able to get a patch out until Valve were back at their desks the next day.

Strike a pose

What do most players do in Garry's Mod these days? Do you know what the most popular mode or mod for it is? When is the last time you played it yourself?

GN: The roleplay gamemodes are still a huge thing, but that in itself can encompass a thousand other sub gamemodes. Between Facepunch, Rust, two kids and trying to watch 10 hours of TV every day—I don’t have much time to play nowadays. I used to feel bad about that, like a great chair maker that doesn’t like to sit on chairs. But I think it’s just that I enjoy making them a whole lot more than playing them.

Being able to pose ragdolls made Garry's mod a great tool for comics, videos, and machinima. How did that function first come about?  

GN: A total accident. I was trying to pose ragdolls, but not by freezing their joints. I was trying to make it so they would move like the atmosphere was really thick, so they’d stay in place. The physics in Source back then weren’t as stable as they are now. You could really easily cause a crash by giving it numbers that it wasn’t expecting. I used the wrong values and it locked one of their bones in place. I made a quick pose—I think it was Kleiner giving birth. I was really excited—I immediately knew the fun everyone was going to have with this.

What's the biggest requested feature you get from Garry's Mod players?

GN: The biggest thing, by about a million miles is the "Played with Garry" achievement. It’s one of the hardest achievements to get on Steam—for obvious reasons.

Valve has hired a number of people who mod their games. Am I remembering correctly that you tried to get a job with Valve at one point?

GN: Yeah I applied for a job, I think it was before Garry’s Mod went on sale. Or might have been just after. Around that time anyway. I had a phone interview and I don’t think it took them long to realise that I didn’t know shit. I didn’t get offered a position. In retrospect it’s a good thing. Helk (Rust lead) had an interview with them too, he made it all the way to an in-office interview. They had him writing out code on a whiteboard. I can’t even code without Google—so I wouldn’t stand a chance at that.

Have you hired any people at Facepunch based on mods they've made in Garry's Mod?

GN: No, it wasn’t something we were prepared for, as a company, back then. It’s something we should have been doing. I see the stuff the Tower Unite guys have managed to do after their Gmod Tower gamemodes and kick myself. It’s a great thing for them, to go out and make their own game but in an ideal world we could have made it good for all of us.

Future tense

Garry's Mod is still being updated, but how often do you personally still work on Garry's Mod?

GN: I haven’t personally worked on it for about three years. Rubat and Willox have done a really good job of taking it off my plate. I found that it got to a place where anything I tried to change I got yelled at by the community for breaking something else. So I felt like it’s better to just maintain it, to keep it ticking over so the modders can do their thing. Or risk breaking 15 years worth of content.

What's the Garry's mod mod that hasn't happened yet, but you really wanted to happen?

GN: There’s actually a ton of things I want to do, but I don’t like to talk about it too much. If you talk about stuff you want to do you don’t end up doing it, because you feel like you already did it. You get all the positive feedback from it. Plus I don’t want to pull a Peter Molyneux and talk about a bunch of stuff that gets people excited, but let them all down when the idea eventually has to collide with reality.

What's the status of S&box, which sounds like a Garry's Mod for Unreal Engine 4. The last devblog was in 2018.

GN: We did a lot of experimentation with s&box on UE4. It’s actually quite far along but we decided to pause it for now. We’re hoping you’ll hear more about it next year—if not it’s probably dead forever.

Will Garry's Mod still be around in another 15 years? What will it look like then?

GN: In 15 years I’ll be 52. An old man. We’ll have the iPhone 35, Steam’s friend list will be its own operating system and my son will be the age I was when I first made GMod. It’s possible it might be renamed Alex’s Mod and is primarily used to watch exploited/spoilt american kids play with toys in their massive Youtube house. But who knows. We’ll keep updating as long as people keep playing. Maybe we’ll do a sequel.

The multiplayer survival game Rust debuted on Steam in December 2013. Now here we are in 2018,  and wow, it's still there. Not for much longer, however, because believe it or not creator Garry Newman announced today that it will go into full release on February 8. 

Predictably, Newman said that development will continue after the 1.0 release, but the update schedule will change from weekly to monthly, to help reduce the likelihood of "rushing in features and fixes that end up breaking something else." For those who prefer to live dangerously, a "Staging Branch" of the game with daily updates will exist alongside the stable main branch. It's basically a PTR—Public Test Rust, if you like—that never goes away. 

"You can have both versions installed at the same time, so our hope is that we'll get one or two servers on the staging version that are populated all the time and help test the updates that are coming to Main at the end of the month," Newman explained. 

Despite the big step, he also very clearly wants to keep expectations under control. "Please try not to compare the game to some other finished game or some idealized version you have in your head. Compare the game now to how it was when we entered Early Access. That's the delta that we feel qualifies us to leave Early Access," he wrote. "Think of it more like we're leaving Prototyping and entering Alpha."

The full release of Rust will be a quiet affair, with no launch parties, surprise reveals, or other such shenanigans—"Business as usual" is how Newman described it—but there will be a price increase, from $20 to $35. "It sucks, it's going to cost more, but this was always the deal. And it's not like we're increasing the price to $60 without any warning," he wrote. "This is one of the main reasons we've decided to post this blog rather than quietly slipping out of Early Access, we felt like this is something you'll all want to be warned about." 

"Thanks to everyone that took the risk by buying our Early Access game. It hasn't always been the most stable, optimized, balanced experience—but we hope you don't feel like we've let you down." 

Garry Newman of Facepunch Studios, developer of Rust, reported on Twitter today that the 329,970 copies of the Early Access survival game have been refunded on Steam. According to Newman (in another tweet), that comes to around 6% of all copies sold. (Extrapolating from that, it appears Steamspy's estimation of 5,509,983 Rust owners is pretty close to the mark.) In terms of dollars, those refunds total an eyebrow raising $4.3 million USD.

It's probably not quite sensible to look at the $4.3 million as a straight-up loss of revenue. Since Steam began allowing refunds of games played for fewer than two hours, customers have presumably become much more cavalier about purchasing and trying games, knowing there's a safety net if they decide they don't want to keep them.

I asked Newman via Twitter what the most common reason given for requesting a refund was, and he replied "Not fun followed by bad performance - which is pretty fair I think."

Facepunch Studios boss Garry Newman has some advice for Rust players who have grown bored with the game: Stop playing it. He acknowledged that the sentiment may come across as dismissive, but said in a message on Reddit that it's necessary to break the "ping-pong loop" that's holding the game back from full release. 

"I'm noticing a pattern, and we need to address it. It's something we need to get past as a community, not only because it's getting boring but because it has wider implications," he wrote. "We're stuck in ping pong loop. We release an update, you love it for a month, you get bored, blame the system, bitch for a few months, then we release another update—and the same thing happens." 

His concern is that the pattern will persist indefinitely, because the real problem isn't that the new systems are better than the old ones, but simply that they're "fresher." But Facepunch obviously can't keep overhauling the game forever, and thus Newman suggests a clean break for those unhappy with Rust. But he also asked that people who do end up quitting, or who think his attitude is unfair, give thought to "whether we have given you enough entertainment over the last three years to justify pocketing your $20" before getting angry.

"If you're interested in the game, if you play regularly and still get enjoyment when you play—we're definitely interested to hear what you think. We especially love hearing your stories, watching your videos, seeing your screenshots and paintings—all things that this subreddit has been very low on," Newman wrote. "If we want to leave Early Access then breaking this loop has to be part of that plan. We have a pretty good idea on how to push forward with Rust, but none of it is going to make the game more appealing to people that have spent their last 1,000 hours hating it." 

As silly as it sounds, it's actually very easy to find players with more than 1000 hours in Rust giving it negative reviews on Steam. Two of them are on the front page, along with a few 100-plus-hour negative reviews; one of them, with more than 1200 hours on record, came about at least in part in response to Newman's statement. It's an unfortunate reaction, but probably inevitable, too: Sooner or later, every game developer has to settle on what exactly they're trying to make, and no matter how good that final concept may be, somebody, somewhere, is going to be mad about it.  

The online survival game Rust was recently changed to randomly, and irreversibly, assign a gender to players based on their Steam ID. It's a fairly natural evolution of a system that already assigns faces, skin tones, and—for those who have them—dongs in an identical fashion, but it was nonetheless not a popular decision with everyone. In a column in The Guardian, Facepunch Studios boss Garry Newman described the reaction to the system as “extreme,” but said the change is all about gameplay, and gave no indication that it will be reconsidered.

“Rust is not a game about identity. The objective in Rust is to survive,” Newman wrote. “You will survive better if you’re a part of a group, but this takes a lot of mutual trust. If you kill someone you’ll be able to loot their corpse and take all their food, medicine and weapons. This makes the game very interesting socially, since players struggle with trust and slowly build up relationships with one another.”

Newman said the studio wanted to avoid wasting a lot of time and resources on what it believed would be an unnecessary character customization tool. More interestingly, it also saw the permanent race and gender assignments as a way of tightening up the social aspect of the game by making it more difficult to avoid the consequences of bad behavior. “A survivor shouldn’t be able to attack another then come back later with a different gender or race and befriend the same player,” Newman wrote. “They should be recognizable consistently and long-term—so anyone likely to commit a crime would be more likely to wear a balaclava or a face mask.”

While "most complaints about being black in the game have generally been from Russian players," Newman writes, criticism of game-assigned gender is more of a universal thing. The studio has been accused of pushing a political agenda and “feminist ideals,” and some transgender players have also been critical: One suggested that assigning an unchangeable sex had echoes of real-world transphobia. Female players, on the other hand, have been generally less worked-up about it, because, as Newman noted, “they've already been playing Rust as men for the past two years” anyway.

“Ultimately the decision comes down to gameplay. We don’t believe that letting you choose your race and gender would improve the game,” he wrote. “On the other hand, randomizing everyone’s gender and race meets all our requirements. We get an even spread of races and genders that make players more identifiable—while at the same time making the social aspects of the game much more interesting.”

Newman's Rust column can (and probably should) be read in full at The Guardian.

Garry's Mod was originally released as a Half-Life 2 mod in 2004, before being re-launched as a standalone sandbox physics games in 2006. Over the next eight years, it rang up a cool six million copies—an impressive achievement by any measure. But in the year and four months since then, it's sold another four million copies.

With all due respect, I share Newman's apparent surprise and confusion. Four million unit sales of any indie PC game in a single year is remarkable, but to do it in the ninth year of standalone release is unexpected, to put it mildly. Strange, even. Garry's Mod is clearly very good at what it does, but it's been doing it for almost a decade now. So the obvious question is, “Why?”

Newman attributed much of the surge to “YouTube, Twitch, and Steam sales,” which he said have been having a snowball effect on sales over the past few years. “The more players, the more videos and streams, the more people watching, the more people buying and playing and streaming,” he said. “The steam sales really boost that effect. On a pretty average day it sells about 3000 copies. On Christmas Day [this year] it sold just over 75,000 copies.”

He also pointed out that the age of Garry's Mod, which is built on the Source Engine, can actually work to its advantage. “Most Source Engine games run on anything, from the shittiest ten-year-old windows XP laptop to the latest Alienware monstrosity. And it doesn't just run on the shitty laptop, it runs really well. I think that's something we overlook as game developers—awesome performance should be considered a feature, with higher priority than graphics,” he continued.

“There was a lot of outrage and negativity when we announced that we were going to charge for it so I wanted to show people that this was a good thing. That the money would be used to develop the mod further and allow me to concentrate on it full time. People are amazed that a ten-year-old game is still selling really well—but I guess Windows is over 30 years old, and it's still selling. The only real difference is that I didn't bundle up and re-charge people for the updates we made. Hopefully people don't see it as such a bad thing now, in retrospect.”

I'd say it's sure looking that way.

Thanks, GamesIndustry.

Head over to the Rust store page on Steam and you'll notice a new option offering "Items available for this game," including clothing and firearms, that can be purchased for real money. It's the first (and, as far as I know, only) implementation of "Item Stores," a function introduced in the latest update to Steam that enables developers and community creators to sell in-game items directly to players.

The Rust Item Store exists, and will continue to exist, alongside the Community Market, and pricing will often be different. The Red Shine Pistol on the Rust Item Store, for instance, goes for around $3, but costs just under $5 on the Community Market; the Forest Camo T-shirt, on the other hand, costs the same $3 on the Item Store but can be had on the Market for 5 cents. That might sound a bit sketchy, but product descriptions on the Item Store very visibly include the Community Market pricing as well.

"Part of the reason for having the market prices next to the listings is to make it clear to people if the price is lower somewhere else. Items will come and go from the item store, but they'll be available on the market as long as people are selling them," Facepunch Studios mastermind Garry Newman explained. And while the Rust Item Store currently features studio-made items "as a test for the system," it's mainly in place for community-created items.

Newman acknowledged that the Item Store bears some surface similarities to the paid mods fiasco that caused so much upset earlier this year, but noted that the products it sells are strictly cosmetic, and they're also given to players through random, timed drops in the game, meaning that nobody will be excluded.

"I think the [paid mods] launch on Skyrim gave a really negative vision of what the future looked like. Instead of showing how it would lead to better, more supported mods, it showed how you were going to be asked to pay for the shit you were getting for free yesterday," he said. "Pretty much all the modders I've spoken to would at least like the choice to sell their mods. Personally I think they deserve to be able to make that choice themselves. It's not a choice that should be made by us, or Valve or by the neckbeards on Reddit."

He expanded upon that thought in a post on his personal blog, in which he said that Valve's approach is good for everyone, including people who can't, or don't want to, spend money on this stuff. "They hate traditional microtransactions because it’s a paywall. But on Steam they play the game and get random drop items, and can then sell and trade those items on the marketplace," he wrote. "It’s not unfeasible that a player will make more money selling items than the game itself cost."

Newman said the backend for Item Stores has actually existed for some time now, and that as far as he knows it's available to any developer who wants to use it. "Steam doesn't really partition features off for certain people, everything they add is there to be used by all developers," he said. "We're just agile enough to have gotten there first."

I imagine it won't be the last.

The sandbox physics game Garry's Mod has been around for just about forever—since late 2004, to be precise, first as a mod for Half-Life 2 and then as a standalone release. It's sold more than six million copies since then, and after all this time remains one of the most popular games on Steam, currently holding 11th place on the top 100 concurrent players list. And now, more than ten years later, there's finally talk of a follow-up.

The word came during a PCGamesN interview with Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman, when the site asked if he'd ever consider increasing the game's longstanding $10/£7 price tag. "We wouldn't raise the price now, I mean we’re kind of working on a sequel, so it’d be stupid to the raise the price, really," Newman replied. "It’s early days. We’re looking at having more VR stuff in it—that’s the big point of it. And it won’t be called Garry’s Mod 2."

That's a long way from an announcement, and given the way that Newman and Facepunch Studios work—"at their own pace," you might say—anything more official may well be a long way off. The future of virtual reality may be a factor as well: If Oculus Rift, Vive, or whatever else comes along goes over big, Newman ought to have a lot more incentive to push a VR-centric sequel than he will if they tank.

Female models are now partially live in Rust, which is to say that they're in the game, but work on them remains to be done. For now, all admins will be switched to the female model to help with testing, and once the models are fully implemented, a player's sex, like his or her race, will be assigned at random.

"We still have some stuff to work out, like making alternate clothing models for her, but if you’re an admin on a server you’ll be the female model," Newman wrote in the latest devblog. "To clear up some confusion, when we it does go live you won’t get a choice of whether you’re female or male. We’re not 'taking the choice away' from you. You never had a choice. A man’s voice coming out of a woman’s body is no more weird than an 8 year-old boy’s voice coming out of a man’s body."

Newman confirmed in email that all admins will be set to female automatically, although "that just for testing right now." And yes, like other physical characteristics, sex will be assigned to specific Steam IDs, and cannot be changed.

The devlog also answers questions about the game's integration of Steam inventory, because, Newman said, "I know this shit makes people nervous." Items being added to the inventory are purely cosmetic, and more significantly, Facepunch isn't charging for them; instead, they'll be awarded based on playtime. There are currently no plans to sell blueprints, which he said the studio sees as "more like a card collecting game where the cards are something you actually want," but it could happen in the future.

"The thing I guess to understand is that Rust is STILL in Early Access and we need to take advantage of that fact," he wrote. "This is the time for experimentation—because once it’s not in early access we won’t be able to do these kinds of game changing things—and we’ll wish we had."

Other changes to the game include the addition of Bone and Wood armor, changes to player movement and "Head Freelook," various visual improvements, and quite a bit more. By all appearances, it's been a busy week. Full details are up at PlayRust.com.

Headlines we didn't end up running for this story

• Mo' penis, mo' problems
• Finally, your tiny dick is an advantage
• Half-cocked: why a tiny peener might save your life
• Why having a big penis in Rust is actually a curse
• Units of measurement: big dongs mean little disadvantages in Rust
• Keen peen genes means mean beings will bean your obscene peeing machine

Rust’s unique approach to character creation—that is, giving players absolutely no control over character creation—is one of the bolder experiments by a developer on its player population. In March, when Rust began randomly selecting players’ skin color for them, an attribute permanently bound to your character, it sparked a range of interesting reactions, from anger and delight to confusion.

Tomorrow, as part of Rust’s usual Thursday update, penis size will become a variable element of your character. And surprisingly, Facepunch say that the “feature” wasn’t a deliberate addition at first, but something that emerged as part of the package of algorithms that drive random generation of stuff like head size and jaw definition. “The dick thing wasn’t really planned, it just so happens that it has a separate bone there for the censorship cube that we can scale independently,” Facepunch founder Garry Newman told Kotaku.

But the decision to keep it in the game was deliberate. “We're hoping like hell for more dick jokes. We might all range from 20-40 years old at Facepunch, but we're all eight years old at heart.,” says Newman. “I heard SteamDB is adding a way to track your RDS (Rust Dick Size).” Then again, Newman doesn’t expect the Rust community to react dramatically to the change, partly because the maximum size of a character’s junk is limited by the fixed size of Rust’s ‘censorship box.’ “You've really got to be lining players up and comparing them to see any real change,” says Newman.

The expected range of sizes is small, but players who have bigger penises will actually get the short end of the stick; taking a crotch shot in Rust deals more damage than a hit to some other areas of the body. “All the hitboxes are scaled. People with a bigger dick get a bigger dick hitbox, people with a bigger head get a bigger head hitbox,” says Newman.

To Newman, the broader point of randomizing something like penis size is that there’s value in putting players in a position to play with what they’re given. “We did consider a player customization system,” says Newman. “We looked a bunch of them, we watched them on YouTube. In some cases people were spending a couple of hours designing their character. The character design part of the game had more work put into it than the game itself. And these were games where what you looked like was completely irrelevant, where it was obviously just on some list that a publisher handed a developer.

“So we thought fuck all that. Fuck spending months making a character designer, lets make the game about the game. Then the more we started thinking in that direction the more we liked it. Assigning based on steamid means that everything we add gets evenly spread across the playerbase. We don't end up with 90 percent male white guys. We end up with a full spectrum. Players have to live with and accept who they are. They are recognizable, so more gameplay mechanics emerge. The long term goal in the back of our heads is to hide player names and have them only recognisable by familiarity. I think we are approaching that.”

Facepunch is the process of finishing a female player model to Rust. ”The body will vary, like the males, but we're not sure to what level. We're trying not to sexualize the nudity in Rust,” says Newman. “That's easy for the male model because there's nothing sexy about a limp penis, in fact it's probably got an inverse sexual property. With boobs that's different maybe.”

The internet may break this week under the weight of Opinions About Paid Mods, but it's worth taking a moment to hear Garry Newman's position. As the creator of Garry's Mod – a fully fledged paid title with origins as a free Source Engine mod – Newman is in the unique position of witnessing the transition from free to paid nearly ten years before Valve's announcement last week.

"It’s probably no big surprise that I’m all for it," Newman writes on his website. "I sold a mod once and everyone was angry that it was happening, until it happened and they got a much better product than they’d have gotten when it was released for free, then they seemed to calm down a bit. It has given me a career for ten years. It’s bought me two houses, a bunch of cars. It’s created a company that has hired 30+ people."

Newman argues that the fledgling modding marketplace will balance itself out eventually, with supply and demand dictating what sinks or swims, and what's paid or free. In this way, free mods will still dominate.

"Some stuff won’t be worth charging for," Newman write. "Some people won’t want paying for their stuff. If a mod takes ten seconds to make and someone wants to charge $10 for it then they won’t sell any copies because it’s not worth it. This is how the market balances itself. They’ll either have to lower their price or make it worth the price."

Meanwhile, those unable or unwilling to pay will inevitably find a way to pirate paid mods, he continues, and the possibility of stolen materials being uploaded shouldn't render the whole operation useless.

"There was a time where they’d almost completely stopped making PC games because of piracy. Should we really let the fact that sometimes people are assholes dictate what we do? Or should we just deal with it when it happens?"

Newman breaks down the pros and cons for each participant in a transaction, admitting that the benefits are weighed too heavily in Valve and the game developer's favour. "It’s obvious that Valve and the game developer need to make money here too, enough to cover costs at least – but it’s the modder’s work that is making the money," Newman said.

"I don’t know whose choice that is though, but it feels like someone is being a greedy asshole. This is something that will get better with time."

It's worth checking out Newman's full write-up here. Gabe Newell also addressed concerns about paid modding on Reddit at the weekend.

Some developers like to lay out their plan for the future of their games in "roadmaps" which break down the path they intend to take from point A to point B. Garry Newman of Facepunch Studios is not one of those developers, but people keep bugging him about what's coming next. So, as an alternative, he's put together what he calls a "mind-map" for Rust that details his ideas without placing undue pressure on the studio.

"I don’t want us to feel tied down to features and timescale," Newman wrote in the most recent devblog. "We’re hobbyists at heart—we’re not a game factory—we don’t need that kind of pressure."

The mind-map, viewable here, is broken down into four basic categories—Priority, Strategies, Future Ideas, and Bugs—each of which branches off into multiple levels of increasing detail. The first priority on the list, for instance, (but not necessarily the number one priority) is Working Blueprints, which includes Blueprint Distribution, Saving/loading, and Limits; Blueprint Distribution devolves further into Radtown Monuments and Item Re-spawing, while Limits branches to Store Unlocked Blueprints, Send Player Unlocked Blueprints, and Limit Item Creation Via Blueprints.

There's much more to it than just that—it's a big document with a lot of ideas on it. But it shouldn't be seen as "ten tablets of stone handed down from God," as Newman put it. "It's a rough, scatterbrain plan of our intentions and direction. Like everything we do, it changes and evolves."

Facepunch recently released a significant update to Rust that shifted its focus from building to exploration.

Well, this is gorgeous. Even if all that evocative wailing initially reminded me of the start of The Exorcist when Father Merrin finds that relic in Iraq that looks like the demon Pazuzu. (But I digress.) This game is called Before, and it's the next project set to come out of Facepunch Studios, the developer best known for Garry's Mod and Rust.

Bill Lowe, whose talents were acquired along with the game by Facepunch this September, presented the trailer for the caveman-'em-up at The Game Awards in Vegas. You can find out more about the making of the game on the team's dev blog here. It's definitely one to watch on the basis of this footage. Because, hey, adorable mammoths.

[Edited for a case of mistaken identity - my bad.]

We don't have a Hammer Simulator yet because, well, that's basically what Rust is sometimes. Facepunch Studios is aware that many players spend a lot of time, maybe too much time, hammering their abodes together in the survival adventure, so a forthcoming update with streamline the process. This means you'll probably spend more time exploring and gathering resources than, y'know, hammering. Apparently some people aren't happy about the changes though. Not enough hammering.

"I’ve seen a few people comment that they don’t understand why we’re changing the build system," Garry Newman writes in a new devblog. "They loved it, it was miles better than legacy, don’t change it, please god don’t change it. Well – you probably should have said something before because all I’ve heard is moaning."

Once the changes are live, players will have a lot less hammering to do. According to Newman, resources rather than time should be the payment for building, and as a result exploration and gathering will be a stronger focus. "Anything we can do to encourage players to explore, we should," Newman writes.

Another reason is that the art cost was too high. "Every component needed 7 different stage models (wood, wood2, stone, stone2 etc), this is a lot of art – especially when you consider that things like stairs don’t need that. The new system keeps these requirements low – while allowing for the maximum customizations."

The full notes are over here.

Microsoft bought Mojang yesterday—you may have heard something about that . You may also have heard grumblings from some corners of the community that Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson "sold out" by taking the money and abandoning his game—and, by extension, his millions of adoring fans—to the fickle whims of of a corporate villain. But Garry Newman, the man behind indie darlings Garry's Mod and Rust , says he'd do exactly the same thing if he could, and you probably would too.

Newman pointed out in a blog post that went up shortly after the Mojang deal was was confirmed that everything changes for an indie developer once he starts hiring people to work for him, because you're suddenly responsible for a lot more people than just yourself. Citing the case of Blitz Game Studios , which shut down in September 2013, laying off 175 employees, and then effectively re-launched in November under a new name, he wrote, "Those are the guys you don't want to be."

"I am sure more than the top guys at Mojang became very financially rich due to this deal and that's something that should be admired—not seen as a bad thing," he continued. "Long story short, I'd have done the same thing. The money is enough to very much take care of all the staff. The game is in relatively safe hands. Mojang's legacy is as a huge success story instead of a one hit wonder. Everyone wins. Can you seriously say you'd have done it differently?"

No, Garry. No, I cannot.

It could only happen on PC: Garry's Mod , a seemingly pointless sandbox allowing all manner of ridiculous and perverse experimentation, has managed to sell 6 million copies. The news comes via Garry Newman himself, who managed to drag himself away from mountains of cold hard cash for long enough to Tweet the news.

Garry's Mod originated as a Half-Life 2 mod. It hit Steam in 2006 and, according to figures from April 2013 , has earned over $22 million. More than a year later, and since the game went standalone earlier this year, that figure has no doubt increased significantly. As reference, the game had sold a mere one million copies back in 2011.

Along with the new sales milestone Newman provided a platform breakdown for the title. The vast majority sold for Windows, 336,765 sold for Mac and 28,322 for Linux.

As for the future of Facepunch Studios, Rust is still in development, albeit in Early Access, while Riftlight is a newly announced topdown shooter which looks pretty sweet .

I think it's safe to assume that for every action, there is at least one person on the internet angry about it. For instance, I ate a cheese, ham and pickle sandwich for lunch, and can only imagine that my decision has already sent someone into an incandescent fury. Luckily, what I didn't do was announce a new game. Facepunch Studios did , and the Rust developer is now faced with a backlash. The reason? Early Access survival game Rust isn't yet finished.

"Are we crazy?" asks Facepunch's Garry Newman , who is about to drop some analogies up ins. "Are we doing it wrong? Should every person in the company be working on the same thing? Should HBO make one TV show at a time? Should Warner Brothers make one movie at a time?"

The point, as you can probably tell, is that work on Riftlight won't affect the development of Rust. In fact, it's one of a number of games being developed by the company. "Assuming [internet commenters] read the full post and got all the information and are still angry... they are probably going to be even angrier to find out that we have three other prototypes being worked on by Facepunch staff."

"Our strategy at the moment is to hire talented people to make the games they want to play," Newman writes. "We're not asking you to fund this. We're not starting a kickstarter and begging you for money – we're funding it.

"We are spending money Rust and Garry's Mod make to do this. Arguing that we should be re-investing that money back into only those games is like telling apple they can't spend the money they made from iPhone and Macs to fund the development of the iPad. Keep in mind that we spent money Garry's Mod made to develop Rust – and that turned out pretty good, right? Or should Helk and Pat have been working on Garry's Mod all that time?"

Newman points to the @RustUpdates Twitter account as a sign of the work that's still being done on the game, and also states his belief that "funding" a game is different to buying into Early Access. "We funded Rust for 1-2 years before it eventually became what it is. You bought early access to it. When you buy a pizza you aren't funding Dominos, you're just buying a pizza. It's true that the sales of Rust have been insane and we have stepped up development to suit, and I think you only have to compare the experimental version to the live version to see that."

Finally, Newman confirms that all the people who work on Rust are still working on Rust—not the studio's other prototypes.

A Rust "reboot" is in the works, with a major overhaul coming in the form of a new development branch that will implement changes to just about every aspect of the game. Fortunately, creator Garry Newman has confirmed that purchasers of the original Early Access release of Rust won't be left out in the cold.

I spent a good chunk of time with Rust for an alpha review in January, and the short version is that I liked it quite a lot. But as good as it is for players, Newman told PCGamesN that it's a mess on the development side. The problem is that the game is rooted in a prototype for an open-world Hitman-style game that has very little in common with what Rust has become.

"There's a lot of systems that are integral to Rust that are 3,000 lines long, that could be 100 lines long," Newman said. "So every time you go to change something you have to chase around finding how these five different systems that it doesn't really need work, then you change it and it breaks 4 different systems that you thought had nothing to do with it."

With so much of the game needing to be changed, Facepunch decided to just start over again. The new version will simplify and speed development, and also bring changes to the interface, crafting and visual fidelity, all while maintaining or even improving performance. But this is all happening in an experimental development branch, while the original—the one I played—remains the default. Just to be sure, we asked Newman if gamers who have the old version of Rust will be given the new one, and the unsurprising answer is "yes."

"They get the new version," he told us. "We're still developing the same game, we just switched tracks."

Rust is available now, in both the default and experimental branches, on Steam Early Access.

Garry Newman trolled me. I asked the Garry's Mod and Rust creator to show us his computer setup and he told me, flat out, that he doesn't use a standard PC. Then I asked him to send pictures of the setup and he included male genitalia on one of his monitors. Dude is messing with me.

But when you're Garry Newman, looking in on the ridiculousness of the industry, you can do that. You can see the notion that a game developer should have some hand-crafted PC with a giant case and laugh. You can get an email from someone about showing off your rig and decide to have a little bit of fun. And his rationale for his non-traditional working setup is fascinating.

What's in your PC?

My work PC is a Mac Pro running Windows 8.1.

• 3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache
• 12GB (3 x 4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
• 1TB PCIe-based flash storage
• Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

What's the most interesting part of your setup?

Probably the fact that it's a Mac Pro. It looks like a bin.

What's on your desk?

Mac Pro, 2 Apple Displays (connected via thunderbolt), a phone that I never use and a printer.

Do you have a gaming PC?

No I don't have a gaming 'PC'. The Mac is probably more powerful and sexy looking than any gaming PC I could build. I've never had any problems with performance. PC manufacturers have kind of got it wrong for 10 years when designing gaming PCs. I don't want a computer that looks like a motorbike, I'm not 12 years old. I want a PC that doesn't look out of place in my living room. I don't want to have to lock it away in its own room.

At one time I did build a smaller PC with a smaller case, but it was always a struggle to fit everything in, and even then everything was quite loud.

Even though I use a Mac I don't use OSX. This kind of makes me a sinner in both camps. PC users hate it because I'm using a Mac (even though it's just a PC) and Mac users hate it because I'm using Windows.

At home I have an iMac with Windows installed. OSX has a tool built in to let you easily install Windows. It's not running emulated, it creates a partition and you boot into it. I have one wire coming from my computer, and that's plugged in the wall to power it.

The only disadvantages to using a Mac are the price and the fact that you can't really upgrade them (except for memory). To me this isn't a big deal because I'm rich as fuck—so I'm more likely to just buy the latest model instead of trying to get 10fps extra in BF4 by upgrading the graphics card.

My days of taking my PC to bits to make it faster are over. In the same way that I don't take my TV or fridge to bits and change components. This stuff doesn't interest me. I just want to use it.

What are you playing right now?

Banished.

What's your favorite game and why?

Ever? My favourite game ever is probably Black and White 2. I don't know exactly why but it's a game that I return to and play through at least once a year.

Mr. Newman also sent a picture of his "PS4/XBone/Steambox desk" for inclusion:

You may have noticed some strange behavior in Garry's Mod if you played it a couple of days ago. An exploit that took advantage of the Source Engine's file sending mechanism made it possible to send files with any extension to the client or server. Strangely, this was used to change users' Steam name to “VINH'LL FIX IT,” and using them to spam friends and players with the word “cough” over chat. The exploit is mostly fixed now, but Garry's Mod's own Garry Newman tells us it could have been a lot worse.

“The worm as I understand it was transferred to the client as a dll, then when it loaded it crashed the client, in the hope that they'd join another server,” Newman told PC Gamer in an email. “When they did it downloaded the server's config file and looked for a rcon password.” RCON, or “remote console,” allows you to control a server remotely. “If it got one, it infected the server by uploading the dll and running it (it didn't need rcon to upload the dll, only to run it). And then the cycle continued.”

Newman said he patched Garry's Mod within an hour of finding out about it, and that Valve did the same, but that it's still possible for the bug to spread via different Source Engine mods, so be careful what you download.

“The effects of the worm were mostly non-destructive as far as we know,” Newman said. “Luckily the creator kept it pretty tame. It could have been a hell of a lot worse. I hope by being proactive and patching it quickly we avoided anyone using it maliciously.”

So far in Rust, I've encountered rock-wielding bandits, malicious architects building one-room death arenas, and a cult of naked men. Poke around the community for a bit, and you'll find more good times in a game with such a sheer degree of freedom. Those flashes of spontaneity are just a small part of why Rust is really cool . Its success is, by now, not a big surprise after a pretty strong early access alpha and taking the top spot for survival RPG player activity, but today marks another notch in Rust's handcrafted leather belt: it's sold over 1 million copies, as tweeted today by Facepunch founder Garry Newman.

As a comparison, it took Garry's Mod a little over five years to hit the same sales milestone since launching on Steam in 2006. More impressive is the fact that Rust is still in alpha, with Facepunch continually tweaking and updating the game as it nears a full release. Rust first arrived on Steam Early Access on December 11.

Last week, Facepunch pushed out a sizable patch that removed zombies from the game entirely and improved animal behavior beyond derp levels. A million sales in almost exactly two months--not bad for a WIP title with a warning line of contains violence and caveman-themed nudity."

We've got our own thoughts on Rust's alpha right here . If you're jumping in for the first time, check out our guide to surviving your first day .

Update: Blimey, that escalated. According to Newman's recent tweet , Rust has now made 55% of GMod's total profits.

Original As of writing, Rust is winning this round in the eternal battle of the exploration and survival games. Which is to say, it's currently beating DayZ in the Steam charts. It's a battle that will likely flip back and forth over the next days and months, proving that people really like to be bludgeoned to death with rocks, wrenches and the occasional axe. In fact, the game has done so well for Facepunch Studios that, according to founder Garry Newman, it's already made nearly 40% 55% of what his previous game, GMod, made in 9 years.

"We never, ever expected anything to dwarf GMod's success," Newman told GI.biz . "I did some rough maths this morning: in terms of profits, from sales and royalties, in a month Rust has made about 40 per cent of what GMod has made in about nine years. We can't really believe it."

It is a pretty phenomenal figure, given not only that Rust has only been available for just over a month, but also that it's an Early Access title. Meanwhile, Garry's Mod was a regularly updated phenomenon, responsible not only for some of the most endearing pre-Source Filmmaker machinimas, but also for one of the best gaming webcomics ever created. It also had multiplayer servers dedicated to melon racing.

For a rough idea of what that figure equates to, back in March last year, Newman revealed that GMod had made $22 million over seven years.

More revelations can be found in the full GI.biz interview . As for the future of the game itself, check out our own chat with creator Garry Newman . Alternatively, pop on over to our alpha review to see if Rust is deserving on a place at the top of the Steam charts.

Rust has been causing a bit of a stir on Steam Early Access this week. The open world, player-driven survival game is made by Facepunch Studios, which includes the designer behind Garry's mod, Garry Newman. Players are free to hunt, gather and craft their own structures, choosing their own alliances and enemies in a bleak post apocalyptic environment. How is everyone getting along? What are the best player builds Facepunch have seen so far? We asked Garry, and you'll find his answers below.

PC Gamer: What's the grand concept behind Rust? Why did you want to make it?

Garry: We love DayZ and we wanted to make a game like it. So we did. We quickly realized that we couldn't create an explorable world as well done as DayZ so we came up with the idea of having the player create the world. This was the seed that spawned Rust. We really loved the idea of players starting with nothing, and having no goals but to exist in the world.

Every decision we make is pushing emergent gameplay. So the players themselves decide how the games are made. We give them the tools, they make the world. For example.. a problem we had was that users wanted to be able to open each others doors. The solution suggested was to have a list of users that you can add to a door - to let your friends use them. That's great but it doesn't happen in real life. It's too secure. It's not exploitable. So what if the door has a combination that you share with friends. Or a key, that you make copies of and give to friends. This solves the problem but it leaves a lot of room for emergent gameplay. You could build a house and hide the key somewhere in the world for another player at a later time. You could be forced to hand over your key at gunpoint, and be locked out of your own house etc.

PC Gamer: It's an incredibly ruthless game, and players often kill on sight. Do you have any plans to counter this, or do you see it as part of the experience?

Garry: So one thing that was suggested was making 'bandits'. Making people turn evil, get a negative score if they attack other players. We hate that. People should be nice to each other because they get a nice feeling from being nice. There shouldn't be a system hanging around forcing people to be good. It removes a lot of gameplay fun.

One of the things we did that made a huge difference here unexpectedly was add voice chat. A lot of the time players attack each other out of fear. They don't want to be the person to die. Being able to talk to the other guy and feel them out that way makes a huge difference. There's a lot of this 'tweaking' we can do, kind of social engineering to make people more comfortable with each other.

PC Gamer: There are a lot of permadeath/survival games around at the moment. What do you think sets Rust apart from the competition?

Garry: To be totally honest we haven't played any of the others. With Rust we're making the game we want to play. We're being ruthless with the development, being careful to test each theory instead of just dismissing it as a bad idea.

We're handling the building, cooking, crafting stuff pretty well I think. To the point where I think it's convinced some of the bigger boys to add it to their games too. The fact that we can influence those that inspired us is proof enough that we're doing something right.

PC Gamer: Have players done anything in the game that has impressed you?

Garry: Hah - every time another player comes up to me in game and doesn't bash me to death with a rock I'm impressed.

There's a lot of building that's impressed us. There's a lot of rival gangs stuff... that actually causes a lot of problems for us, because they get too powerful and consume all the resources on the map. We need to look at ways to balancing that.

PC Gamer: There's lots of stories of players imprisoning other players and having fun with them.

Garry: During early development we accidentally left a small white static cube out miles away from anywhere. There was a French server we joined and they'd built a huge shrine around it in a big circle, like a crop circle.

Helk tells a story about one time he was talking to a new bunch of players and showing them the ropes, said good luck then he went to bed, expecting them to die within the next 10 minutes and then hate the game and never come back. When he went on next they'd played through the entire night, had got all sorts of weapons and built a huge fortress.

PC Gamer: What kind of player behaviour have you noticed emerging? Any kinds of play styles that have surprised you?

Garry: It's a weird thing. When any player can kill you easily - and they don't, it's like the biggest compliment ever. They become good friends. You go to bed, and lie there and think to yourself "that was a nice guy, I hope I run into him again." It's a very weird feeling to be having in a game. I mean, people help each other out in TF2 all the time. A medic tops you up, but you don't feel a closeness to them. I guess it's because the world is so harsh you kind of feel closer to people that are kind. It must be an in-born reaction or something.

PC Gamer: How much impact does the community have on the ongoing development of the game?

Garry: It has a huge impact. It's a double edged sword.

Some people get a lot of stuff wrong, in their suggestions and ideas.. and they get angry at us for doing things differently. They say we're going to ruin the game and stuff. Which I don't know.. Don't they think they know what we're doing? Why would we want to make our game worse? They don't really understand what the game is about and don't really trust us to take it in the right direction.

But then there's a huge group that instantly get what we're trying to do. They get that we want to do things different. They understand why the game has to be harsh, why we can't add reputation points. And they make awesome suggestions that we'd never even thought of.

Sometimes we'll have a problem and we'll have 5 solutions, but we know in our guts that none of them are perfect, they compromise what we're doing and they're going to cause more and more comprises down the line. Then we'll read the forums and someone will have posted something that is just so perfect. We love that. Having half a million brains looking at a problem can usually produce the perfect solution.

PC Gamer: Thanks for your time, Garry.

If you haven't realised just how big a deal the survival and exploration genre is right now, take a look at the top of the Steam charts. DayZ managed to fend off its competition throughout the Christmas sale: staying in the top spot throughout the event, all while avoiding the discount infection. It sold 875,000 copies in three weeks , and has now found a survival buddy in the shape of Rust . The alpha survival game from Garry Newman and Facepunch Studios is securely in second place on the Steam chart, and has itself sold 150,000 copies in the first two weeks .

So what's the appeal of the game? To find out, Rust player and YouTube videographer Argyle Alligator started interviewing other players inside of the game. Their responses weave a tale of rocks, headshots and hilarity.

Garry Newman , the creator of the all-time bestselling Garry's Mod , is hard at work at a new open-world game that, well, really looks a lot like DayZ with some Minecraft mixed in. Rust is a multiplayer survival game currently in alpha development that forces players to survive in a world plagued by zombies, hunger and cold.

In addition to tracking down food and making clothing to avoid freezing in the night, the most interesting part of Rust is the ability to construct buildings and shelter. Imagine if, in DayZ, the only cities that existed were built, wall-by-wall, by players banding together to keep danger at bay. Oh, and they had to chop down trees with a hatchet to get the wood for all those buildings.

The game has promise, but it will be interesting to see how Rust differentiates itself from Fortnight , DayZ , Minecraft , State of Decay , Dying Light and, well, the other dozen open-world zombie survival games currently in development that we probably haven't even heard about yet. To Newman's credit, the zombies in Rust are just placeholders, and the game has gone without an update because they were figuring out how not to be “just like DayZ.”

“We also hate zombies and are going to replace them with other NPCs at some point,” he says.

You can join the alpha for Rust at its website , or just peruse the Wiki to get a description of the mechanics and gameplay specifics going on.

Image via reddit .

Yesterday, we wrote about a mod-management tool called Gmod . As many PC Gamer readers pointed out, its name creates confusion with GMod, fans' loving nickname for sandbox game Garry's Mod. "Isn't that a trademark infringement?" wondered some fans. The confusion has sparked a bit of an investigation, but now Garry's Mod creator himself, Garry Newman, has come forward with some interesting information on the name mix-up.

In an interview with VG24/7 , Newman admitted that Olympus Games actually owns the name—and that the name confusion has been a contentious issue not just among gamers, but also between the two developers.

“It's actually the other way around," Newman said. "They own the trademark for 'gmod' and have threatened to take us to court if we don't other buy it off them—along with all their domains and Twitter accounts—or post a press release pointing out we're not affiliated, along with a permanent link on garrysmod.com and our twitter, and force the community not to abbreviate Garry's Mod to GMod.

"Garry's Mod pre-dates their trademark, as does the abbreviation of Garry's Mod to GMod. As a bonus our game is called Garry's Mod—not GMod. It's only occasionally abbreviated to GMod out of convenience."

Newman feels that the people behind the mod-management tool should've rebranded long ago to avoid confusion, rather than traverse this rocky legal territory now. However, Skylar Kreisher from the Gmod team says there's another side to the story, which we'll be hearing about soon in their next Kickstarter update . We've also contacted Kreisher directly, and will inform our readers if we hear anything back.

Garry's Mod , that wonderful physics sandbox of posable characters doing very silly things, has done rather well since attaching a $10 price for its tomfoolery back in 2006. Last December, GMod passed the milestone of 2 million copies sold , an accomplishment made possible by word-of-mouth and creator Garry Newman's regular feature updates. Responding to a fan's question in a blofg post , Newman reveals the mod accrued an astounding $22 million over seven years, but he also says taxes took large bites out of the monstrous moneydollar amount.

"Over seven years, GMod has made about $22 million dollars," he writes. "We get less than half of that though. The tax man gets a bunch of that. Then when we take money out of the company, the tax man gets a bunch of that too."

A Google Image search for " Garry's Mod tax man " sadly doesn't provide an appropriate response image for Newman's achievement, instead showing a balloon chair, ponies, and a Teletubby mugging a Companion Cube. Wait, what am I saying? They're all appropriate.

As for the future of Garry's Mod and what's next for Newman and the rest of his team at developer Facepunch Studios, Newman lines up a few upcoming features in the works.

"Hopefully, we're gonna get the Linux version out," he says. "Then hopefully we'll move to SteamPipe, and I'll get the NextBot stuff hooked up. Then I want to do another Gamemode Contest. But I want to knock out a bunch of gamemode creating tutorials first to help people get their foot in the door."

By the way, if you're leery of plopping down a Hamilton for a constantly updated playground of imagination (" Garry's Mod what are you thinking " in Google), you can grab the old-but-free Garry's Mod 9 from Mod DB .

Garry's Mod, the oddball Source sandbox and bizarre facial expression generator, is receiving Kinect support. In a preview video posted to YouTube, Gmod's Garry Newman shows... Actually, you're better off just seeing for yourselves.

Yep.

Garry provided some details as to how it works in the description of the video. "You move your arm and the ragdoll moves its arm. You jump - and it jumps. It's live, your body is directly controlling the ragdoll." And you won't just be performing for your own gratification, as there's multiplayer support too. "You can join a server and take control of a ragdoll. Your friend can join and take control of one and you can dance together." You can read more about the development process of the update over at Garry's blog .

You're now all imagining Half-Life Full Life Consequences as a mo-capped performance, right? Good, not just me then.

Thanks, Reddit

Garry Newman, creator of the brilliant sandbox Source mod, Garry's Mod, has posted a graph of the game's entire Steam sales history on Twitter . The graph features a red line that represents Garry's predicted sales, and a white line that depicts the actual sales. There is quite a big difference. Garry predicted that interest would tail off towards the end of 2009, but it just kept on going, and going. It's selling more than twice the number of copies each week than it was when it was first released back in 2007. Take a look.

Look at those spikes. The mini jaggies are all weekends, the massive spikes will be Steam sales and promotions. Garry confirmed to a Twitter inquirer that the graph shows the sale of 1.4 million copies. The steady growth of Garry's Mod will be down to more than just word of mouth. Garry's Mod receives constant updates, all of which are listed over on the official Garry's Mod site . In short, Garry is probably doing quite well from his creation. The success of Garry's mod shows that supporting a game for a long time after release can pay off quite spectacularly.

Garry's Mod is available now on Steam . The outdated Garry's Mod version 9 is free. It doesn't have all the features of number 10, but serves well as a demo if you want to check it out.

Back in 2004, Garry's Mod turned Valve's Source Engine into a toybox. Its intuitive UI, straightforward controls and building tools removed the programming barriers needed to be creative with Source. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have used the mod to attach rockets to the G-Man's head, build a giant robots or mess around with the physics system. The community has created hundreds of new game modes, mods and machinima using the tools.

Today, developer Garry Newman posts on his his site to announce that Garry's Mod has now sold more than a million copies since its launch on Steam in 2007.

"This is a pretty big deal for me considering this all started off as a tiny tiny modification about 6 years ago," writes Garry. "This is more than I could have ever expected or wished for!"

"Even though my name is on the Mod there are a lot of people that have helped out over the years – and GMod wouldn't be where it is now without them. Particularly Valve & Steam – which made Garry's Mod technically feasible"

Garry's Mod is available to buy on Steam now for £6 / $10. Garry's Mod 9, an older version with less features, can be downloaded from Steam for free.