One day after the release of S&box, the successor to the legendary Garry's Mod, the results are a mixture of massive financial success and technical growing pains. While reviews are currently sitting at 44% and player numbers are lower than its predecessor, Facepunch Studios claims the launch is going "pretty much exactly as expected."

Handling the Growing Pains of S&box

Garry Newman, the studio boss, addressed several backend hurdles in a recent post-release update. The team faced several immediate technical challenges during the initial surge:

  • The backend went down on multiple occasions.

  • The studio accidentally DDoS'ed themselves.

  • Certain services required urgent scaling to meet demand.

Newman noted that, as is typical in these scenarios, the services that were overwhelmed were not the ones they had initially considered. Regarding the mixed reviews, he explained that the team intentionally avoided a frontpage takeover or any major push from Valve because they wanted players to find the game organically.

Addressing "AI Slop" and Content Discovery

A major point of contention at this early stage is the presence of "AI slop" within the ecosystem. Newman addressed this by suggesting that while it isn't perfect, AI can serve a functional purpose in the future.

"AI is the teacher now. It's how people are going to learn how to program from now on," Facepunch wrote. The studio believes human creativity will ultimately prevail, even if developers use AI to generate examples or explain code.

To manage content quality, S&box will not ban AI-assisted games. Instead, the team is working to refine a discovery algorithm—similar to Valve's approach—to ensure "the good games float to the top and the bad games float to the bottom."

Prioritizing Rendering Quality Over Modern Shortcuts

Performance remains a significant hurdle, but Facepunch is taking a unique approach to engine development. Rather than relying on modern rendering technologies that can compromise visual clarity, developer Matt explained their preference for forward rendering.

The team is intentionally avoiding certain common techniques to prevent visual degradation:

  • Temporal upscaling
  • Temporal AA
  • Amortized GI

"It's fast but it all adds up to a blurry, ghosty mess that falls apart the moment you move," Matt explained. Instead, they are opting for MSAA and rendering everything in a single frame to ensure the game looks great in motion rather than just in screenshots.

A $1 Million Launch and the Future of the Play Fund

Despite the technical hiccups, the financial launch was a massive success. S&box generated nearly $1 million on its first day alone. In response to this milestone, Facepunch is doubling the Play Fund—which pays community developers based on engagement—to $1 million.

The studio remains committed to the long-term evolution of the platform. "We have development challenges ahead of us but this is what we're here for. This is what we love," Facepunch concluded. "We love it when things break because then we get to fix them."