S&box Launched, Made Nearly a Million Dollars, and Immediately DDoS'd Itself
Garry Newman's follow-up to Garry's Mod finally launched. S&box pulled in nearly a million dollars on day one. The backend went down. Facepunch accidentally DDoS'd their own servers. Reviews landed at 44%. And somehow, this is actually a good story.
The Numbers First
Close to a million dollars on launch day. That's not nothing for a sandbox game from a studio that famously didn't beg Valve for a frontpage takeover or any promotional push. No featured placement, no homepage banner. Just word of mouth and a fanbase that's been waiting for the Garry's Mod successor for years. The money showed up anyway.
If you want to understand how confident Facepunch was, that's your signal right there. They left promotional tools on the table and still nearly cleared seven figures in a day.
44% Mixed Reviews and Why That's Not the Whole Story
The Steam reviews sat at 44% on launch day. Mixed. That sounds bad. It kind of is bad. But launch day reviews for something like this are a specific kind of chaos. Servers went down once or twice. Facepunch apparently sent so much traffic their own way they effectively DDoS'd themselves. People who couldn't connect left reviews.
This could mean the 44% reflects infrastructure pain more than the actual game. One possibility is that the score climbs significantly once the backend stabilizes and people get actual playtime. Still worth watching.
The Tech Choices Are Interesting
S&box uses forward rendering with MSAA. Renders one frame per frame, old school style. No temporal upscaling, no temporal AA, no amortized GI. This is a deliberate stance against the modern pipeline that games like every AAA release have leaned on hard.
Whether that's a smart bet depends on what Facepunch is optimizing for. Community-built content running on clean, predictable rendering might matter more to them than squeezing out extra visual fidelity. Makes sense for a platform where strangers are building the games.
The Play Fund Got Doubled
The Play Fund pays community developers based on engagement. After launch day revenue came in, Facepunch doubled it to a million dollars. That's the part that actually matters long term. The game is a platform. The platform lives or dies based on what gets built on top of it. Putting money directly into the hands of the people building the content is the right call, and doing it immediately after a strong launch day is a good look.
Garry's Mod built a decade-plus of relevance on community creativity. TTT, DarkRP, Prop Hunt. None of that was Facepunch. The Play Fund is S&box's version of that bet, except now there's actual money attached.
Should You Care
If you played Garry's Mod and remember why it was great, yeah. S&box is trying to be that. The launch was messy and the reviews were rough and they DDoS'd themselves, but Facepunch didn't need Valve's marketing machine and still had a strong day one. That tells you something about the audience that was waiting for this.
Check back once the backend issues settle. The 44% launch day score isn't the final word.
Source: Pcgamer