Garry Newman, the mind that created everyone’s favourite creative monstrosity Garry’s Mod believes that the iconic PC game was a “dead end” for developers. As the developer’s new sandbox game, s&box, launches on Steam, Newman explains that the spiritual successor is designed to fix a lot of the issues with his 2006 debut.
To this day, Garry’s Mod is more than just a platform for Source Engine shenanigans, whether you’re using Half-Life 2 assets or original, hand-crafted assets. Over the game’s two decades of life, players have created full games within its thin boundaries, but any game that wanted to release outside of its constraints had to be fully remade.
“I’d love to get to a point where people think of this as the Steam Engine.”
Garry Newman on the future of s&box
With s&box, Newman has worked out an agreement with Valve that allows creators to publish full games made within the title as their own independent releases. Creators working within Newman’s games will not only be able to make money through its “Play Fund”, but will also be able to release their games as full products outside of s&box, giving devs power over their work.
“The problem with Garry’s Mod was that it was a dead end for developers,” he told Springboard. “If I were a developer now, I wouldn’t learn or create any code for Garry’s Mod, because the skills aren’t transferable and there’s no exit plan”.
Newman explained that players who make the most popular games for Garry’s Mod end up “remaking it in Unity and trying to sell it on Steam”. And, if they don’t, someone else will go ahead and make it themselves. Via Newman’s partnership with Valve, the biggest s&box games will simply become full releases as soon as a developer wants them to.
“That’s the problem we’re trying to solve here,” the developer said. “We should be making an environment where people can invest their time, and it can lead to something else. Whether they’re making money through our Play Fund or whether they decide to export their game and put it on Steam as a real standalone game. There should be options.”
Newman explains that they hope players eventually see the game “as the Steam Engine”, the tool players and creators use on Steam to bring their games to Steam. “Of all the people in the world, Facepunch is best positioned to integrate a game engine properly with Steam,” he said. “So yeah, we’d love to be fully integrated and compatible with all of Valve’s hardware. We’d love to be the best choice for all of that. That’s definitely our intention.”
s&box is available on Steam right now for $19.99/£16.75.
