Facepunch founder Garry Newman (Garry's Mod, Rust, s&box) gave an emphatic, extensive mea culpa to the s&box community in a YouTube comment. Newman was responding to the latest video from Eridium, "S&box's Free To Play Weekend Isn't Enough," a highly critical state-of-the-game from the s&box-focused creator.
Facepunch's recently-released user generated content (UGC) platform has been billed as a Garry's Mod successor in the age of Roblox, but has struggled in its first five months on the market. Eridium's biggest critiques, as I understand them:
- The player character models, aka "the citizen," even with their spiffy new necks.
- Facepunch's insistence on not replacing the unpopular design, which Eridium views as "intransigence."
- He argues the game's poor first impression indicates it probably should have been delayed.
- Low quality games (particularly AI slop) flooding the platform and ruining discoverability for the good stuff (Newman previously downplayed the problem in an interview with us).
- A lack of outreach from Facepunch—Eridium argued he already operates as an informal community manager, and that he could do the real job better than Facepunch is currently.
Here's Newman's own response in full, copied from a pinned comment under Eridium's video (you can also check out Eridium's own follow-up from earlier today):
"I like the citizen, I have liked the citizen and I will like the citizen. It gave the game and the platform an identity. Some people like it, most people don't like it. I do still strongly believe that if we were an indie studio making our first game with this character that people wouldn't bat an eyelid, but because we're being compared to Half-Life 2 it's an issue. I wanted to keep doing more with it, to try and improve it and get it to a place where it's likable.. but I think I'm done trying now and we're just going to get rid of it and push the human characters forward.
"I don't like giving up on things, I am stubborn, if there's a problem I want to find an elegant solution. We have obviously dedicated a lot of time and effort into it so there is a sunk cost fallacy there. It's at the point now where I can see it isn't going to change and we're going to have fewer headaches if we just switch totally to humans, so we'll be doing that over the next month or so [emphasis mine].
"There being too much content is a problem. It's no good having 20 good games on the platform when they're swimming in the sea of 500 tech demos and clickers. We're going to address that, we already have plans. We're changing Playfund so it's not incentivising it.
"We're going to switch to a Workshop subscribe/install model for maps and games. We've been trying to have a system where we show you 200 games and let you choose - and it's not what people want. Even if there are 50,000 awesome HL3 quality games, no-one actually wants to choose that way. That's apparent now, that's become really clear.
"The launch was shit. The free weekend was shit. We wanted to float under the radar on launch and build up, but we didn't. It was crap, it has burnt bridges and made people angry, it's given a negative view of s&box, it's turned the gmod community against it. We can't get away from that, we fucked it. We weren't ready and we fucked it. We know that, you know that, we fucked it.
"We have had conversations about hiring you [Eridium] a few times. The conclusion we've always come up with is that you're more useful to us as an independant. We don't want you thinking you can't make videos like this calling us out. We don't want you to stop holding us to account. We're well aware that you're the only YouTuber that really covers us extensively.
"I appreciate that and I'd definitely like to find ways to work together with you in any way we can. But us hiring isn't going to be the one. Message me on WhatsApp or Discord or Steam or email. I am here on the same internet as you. Just message me and ask questions.
"I'm well aware of the situation we have here, and the situation in the past. It's deflating, demoralizing and embarrassing.
"Right now with AI it's either the worst time in history to launch a UGC platform or the best time in history to launch a UGC platform. I don't know which one. I do have the distinct feeling that in 10 years time we'll be looking back at the stuff we do in the next 3 months and either regretting making decisions or regretting not making them."
Newman certainly appears to have a strong understanding of the challenges facing s&box, and that goes to show how tough development is right now: All that experience, knowledge, and revenue from two prior megahits does not guarantee a third. On our team, we all had high hopes for s&box as a Garry's Mod follow up, but have been put off by its similarities to UGC king Roblox.
Given the almost unanimous negativity around s&box's signature character design, it just makes sense for Facepunch to concede at this juncture. I totally see Newman's point, though: Gmod had the built-in familiarity and good vibes of Valve's amazing character designs. Meanwhile, Roblox and Minecraft get by just fine with their extremely blocky, stylized characters.
I was really struck by Newman's comments on the value of Eridium as an external critic vs. internal employee: The ecosystem of influencers and press (hey, that's me) is a huge part of any studio or game's longevity. It demands a certain distance and capacity to be adversarial on the part of professional commentators, or the audience will lose trust in them and the studio.
