Facepunch signed a license with Valve to allow standalone releases from s&box

The spiritual successor to Garry’s Mod based on Valve's Source 2 is growing up, as you'll be able to create full standalone games with it.

Something that Facepunch Studios (developer of Rust) have been planning for a while, but they needed to sort the Source licensing situation out with Valve which thankfully has now been done. As noted in the latest update post from Garry Newman:

We signed the new license with Valve this week, allowing us to allow people to export games from s&box's editor and ship them as standalone games on Steam completely royalty free. This has been a bit of a complicated journey, but with a lot of reassurance and compromises, we've got there.

We still have work to do on our end. We need to create a license between Facepunch and the people shipping games, then double and triple check everything is legit, but I wanted to share this progress with the community so they know that Valve did the bizzo.

When it's ready we'll be piloting it with a few select people. The first out the door is likely to be My Summer Cottage.

Pictured - s&box, credit: Facepunch

Back in November last year, s&box went open source too with people contributing cross-platform improvements directly. With that and royalty-free standalone games, s&box could end up being quite an interesting game engine for developers with its Garry’s Mod / Roblox like design with a mixture of player-made games and standalone releases.

Hopefully s&box will work well with Proton at release which according to the Steam page is in April.