Garry Newman says he originally expected Garry's Mod to make 'about $30,000' as a 'best case scenario'

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."

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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."