Facepunch launches s&box, the highly anticipated successor to Garry's Mod

s&box from Facepunch is the spiritual successor to Garry's Mod. Built with Source 2, it's a full game creation platform that's quite a lot closer to Roblox.

A full game engine where developers can releasegames onto the s&box launcher to earn from, and coming "soon" is the ability to release standalone games on Steam too. For normies, us players, there's a little bit of everything here. While it is released, it's nowhere near finished. You can think of it somewhat more like a full live-service platform in a way. Facepunch will be adding to it and tweaking it constantly as time goes on.

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Highlights:

• Source 2 Engine: Built on the same engine as Half-Life: Alyx and Counter-Strike 2.
• Multiplayer: Party up with your friends and jump into games straight away, no servers needed.
• Game Library: Hundreds of community-made games across every genre, always growing.
• One Click Play: No installing or subscribing - browse and jump into any game instantly.
• Constantly Updated: Like Garry's Mod and Rust - big content updates on a fast cycle.
• Customization: Personalize your player with cosmetics that carry across every game.
• Game Editor: Create your own games in our intuitive editor with C# scripting and real-time hotloading.
• Play Fund: Creators earn money when people play their games.
• Publish to Steam: Coming soon... take your game standalone on Steam, royalty-free.

s&box itself is also open source, so the community can help it improve. Not just the basic code, but even their finances for it are open - which is quite an interesting decision. Naturally, until recently they were losing money since it wasn't actually released. However, I do expect it to do quite well given Facepunch's history.

I did get a few chances to test out s&box and various games pre-release, but the performance was never very good. It seems with the actual release, the performance on my system is still not particularly good even in some of the more simple games. In fact, I would say the performance is generally a bit abysmal. Even in simple games with basically nothing going on, I've often seen below 30FPS. The performance is just weird. I don't think this is a Proton issue either, as their Steam forum is filling up with posts about the performance issues.

It does at least run out of the box with the latest Proton 11 Beta.

s&box Game - Sausage Survivor on Linux

s&box Game - Sandbox on Linux

Downloading games in the launcher is painfully slow too. It takes forever to fetch the information on each game before even getting to the download. They're definitely going to need to work on the optimizations of downloads and storage, because there's far too much waiting around right now.

I'm keen to see how this will evolve, and if any big fun hits get created with it. At least it works on Linux, whereas stuff like Roblox keep blocking the platform.