Garry's Mod creator partners with Valve in deal that ensures games made in his sandbox gem's new successor can be sold royalty-free on Steam: "It's just waiting for us now"

In a remarkably philanthropic move, Valve and Garry Newman have agreed to a deal that will allow creations on S&box, the upcoming successor to Garry's Mod, to be sold royalty free. This opens creators using the toolkit up to the same returns they'd get if they were utilizing Unity or similar.

Arriving 20 years after Garry's Mod first released, S&box is an evolution of the idea, which is a gamified and streamlined development tool for people to experiment and create projects with. Where Garry's Mod used Valve's Source engine, S&box uses Source2, and it's due to go public this coming April.

In making Garry's Mod, Newman was allowed to use assets from Valve at no extra cost to himself, allowing to fully reap the enormous benefits that have come from the game over the years. This has allowed him more capacity to expand, leading to Facepunch Studios and Rust. Now, he's paying that forward by agreeing not to take any kind of licensing fee for anything made in S&box.

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Newman himself confirmed the deal on Discord. "Signed the standalone license with Valve btw, it's just waiting for us now," he says on the official S&box server. He previously clarified that the only revenue the team will be seeing is from sales of the Garry's Mod follow-up.

"We don't make money from standalone, we make money from the platform," he said in a Discord post from October 2025. There are already listings for S&box games on Steam, esoteric exploration game My Summer Cottage by Small Fish being a notable example. You can view more of what people have already made in the fan-made video above.

Regular users of Garry's Mod have been able to access preview versions of S&box since 2021, helping to troubleshoot and workshop features while they create the first wave of releases. Now the question becomes, who'll be the first breakout star of the S&box scene? The race for the next Prop Hunt is on.

Garry's Mod creator expected to only "make about $30,000" on the sandbox game – but some 25 million copies later, it's one of Steam's most iconic smash hits.