The long-awaited Garry's Mod follow-up, S&box, is finally launching on Steam next week, and developer Facepunch Studios is already making some big promises about the game's future. The devs previously announced that they'd partnered with Valve to allow games made in S&box to be sold royalty-free on Steam, and they're taking some well-earned potshots at other platforms driven by user-generated content ahead of launch.
"We're not guided by commercial milestones, we're not going to do an IPO," Facepunch says in a press release. "We do this because we love it, we want to give the community the same opportunities we've had. We want to do that as fair and generously as possible.. Without any corporate mischief."
S&box is billed as a "game creation platform." Think of it along the lines of Roblox, but – hopefully – without the baggage. It offers a set of game creation tools powered by Valve's Source 2 engine, and a platform for users to find and play games that others have created. While the full Steam launch isn't happening until April 28, people have already been building games with an early developer preview version, and some of those games are now preparing for Steam launches of their own.
But even for devs who want to stick within the S&box ecosystem, they will still have an opportunity to profit from their work. "Developers should get paid for their games, so that's what we're doing," the press release notes. "$500,000 paid out to date. This isn't as extreme as others but it'll grow and is sustainable, since we don't have to fire 1000 people to keep it working."
That's likely a not-too-subtle reference to Fortnite, another game-turned-user generated content platform whose developer, Epic, recently laid off over 1,000 people. The promise of a sustainable approach is downright refreshing to hear in 2026, especially when the livelihoods of both the developers at Facepunch and, potentially, the creators who'll be using S&box are on the line.
As Facepunch puts it, the studio wants to give devs the same opportunities it got over 20 years ago. Garry's Mod was, after all, simply a toybox built on the same Source engine that powered Half-Life 2, and it's because of Valve's support that it became such a monumental success. The studio would parlay that success into Rust, which remains one of the biggest survival games out there.
"This is for the community," Facepunch CEO Garry Newman says in a statement. "We're trying to give people the same chances that we've had... we do everything not for ourselves, but for the community."
Those words would ring pretty hollow in the mouths of other developers, but the 20 years of community goodwill that Facepunch has built up suggests that the studio might actually make good on it. An open-source alternative to the likes of Roblox and Fortnite sounds like it has all the potential in the world, but we'll see how the community takes to S&box when it properly launches on April 28.
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