s&box from Facepunch gets a price cut and more improvements

Facepunch are trying desperately to pull in more players for their game creation platform s&box, with a permanent price cut now live.

What is s&box? A game creation platform built on Valve's Source 2 engine. Originally supposed to be a next-generation Garry's Mod, so far it hasn't really managed to do much.

In the official blog post, Garry Newman mentioned:

"I halved the price from $20 to $10 this week.

There has been speculation on twitter that this was a desperate attempt to get more players. Well fucking DUH. Of course it is. We need more players, we don't have enough players. We're being told in reviews constantly that the price is too high, so we're going to lower it to try to encourage more people to play.

Our primary goal on the platform right now is to get more active players. We're improving the platform, encouraging the right type of games, encouraging better discovery and improving performance. We're pushing in a bunch of different directions to achieve a higher active player count, and this is one of them."

Other changes they've made to try and help recently is a new main menu, which they keep improving upon to try and highlight some games that might actually be worth playing. They also now have hover cards when you mouse over them, and they've also been running Game Jams with cash prizes.

It is slowly starting to get some quite nice little games in it - but in the age of Roblox and Fortnite having editors and tons of games, a paid game and editor like this was always going to struggle. Especially since it released without a killer must-have game which I think was a bit of a misstep from Facepunch.