S&box makes nearly $1 million on launch day, and yes there are problems but that's okay: 'We love it when things break because then we get to fix them'

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."

Article continues below

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.