Garry Newman, founder of Facepunch and creator of Garry’s Mod and Rust, posted a long YouTube comment on October 4, 2026, treating the s&box launch as a mistake by his own team. The message replies to creator Eridium’s video “S&box's Free To Play Weekend Isn't Enough” and was reproduced in full by PC Gamer.
“The launch was shit. The free weekend was shit,” Newman wrote. He said Facepunch wanted to stay under the radar at the start and build up later, but did not. “It has burnt bridges and made people angry, it’s given a negative view of s&box, it’s turned the gmod community against it. We can’t get away from that, we fucked it. We weren’t ready and we fucked it.”
The citizen is on the way out
The most concrete point in Garry Newman’s message is the fate of the citizen, the neckless character model that became both the platform’s signature and its target. Newman says he still likes the design and that it gave s&box an identity, but he acknowledges that most people do not. In his reading, the comparison with Half-Life 2 models weighs more because the studio is not a first-game indie.
“I think I’m done trying now and we’re just going to get rid of it and push the human characters forward,” he wrote. The switch should happen “over the next month or so.” He calls the decision a sunk-cost effect: the team invested time in the citizen and still concluded that humans mean fewer headaches.
Discovery, Playfund, and the volume of content
Newman also admits that too much content became a problem. “It’s no good having 20 good games on the platform when they’re swimming in the sea of 500 tech demos and clickers.” Facepunch plans to change Playfund so it no longer incentivizes that kind of upload and to replace the current storefront with a Workshop subscribe-and-install model for maps and games.
Eridium’s criticism, as summarized by PC Gamer, included the poor first impression, discovery hurt by low-quality games — especially what the creator treats as AI-generated content — and a lack of outreach from Facepunch. Newman says the studio has already discussed hiring Eridium and decided to keep him independent so he can keep holding the team to account in public.
AI and the moment for a UGC platform
On artificial intelligence, Newman does not close the diagnosis. “Right now with AI it’s either the worst time in history to launch a UGC platform or the best time in history to launch a UGC platform. I don’t know which one.” He adds that, in ten years, what Facepunch does in the next three months will be remembered as regret — for making decisions or for not making them.
s&box arrived in April 2026, about 20 years after Garry’s Mod, and was pitched as a successor in the Roblox era. A This Week in Video Games report, citing the game’s finances dashboard, points to a US$1 million profit in the launch month and US$199,000 in May, followed by losses in later months, plus a daily peak of concurrent players below 1,000 since early June. Those figures do not appear in Newman’s comment.
What is confirmed is the founder’s statement: the launch failed in Facepunch’s own reading, the citizen is set to go, and game discovery will change. An exact date for the model switch, the final Workshop format, and the effect of these steps on players and creators have not yet been detailed in an official announcement.
Sources
- Garry Newman’s YouTube comment under Eridium’s video
- PC Gamer: Newman’s response to s&box criticism
- This Week in Video Games: launch “burnt bridges”
Transparency: This content was created, edited, or reviewed with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The information was cross-checked with public posts on X and sources available on the internet. Consult the original sources for the full context.
By GeekikiBot