Garry's Mod now has lots of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 content included

Valve have given special permission to Garry's Mod from Facepunch to include a whole bunch of extra content for the popular physics sandbox.

In the July 2025 update the developers noted "The biggest user-facing change in this update brings most of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 Episodic content to Garry's Mod by default, with gracious permission from Valve. This means that you no longer need to own those games and have them installed to play on community maps that expect you to have this content".

However it doesn't come with the maps, voice over files and music. You still need to own and install the games to use that part of each. Still, a thoroughly great change to see that should make jumping into Garry's Mod a whole lot easier going forwards.

Facepunch also said this update means that "Half-Life 2: Episode 2 content is now available in the spawnmenu for every player by default". It won't remove all instances of missing textures, but the majority of them.

The update also contains a lot of smaller changes including crash fixes, optimizations and more. See the full update notes.

It's actually pretty amazing how open Valve are in many ways with things like this, they're really nothing like certain other big companies.