20 years after Garry’s Mod changed pretty much everything, Facepunch Studios has revealed that the sandbox successor s&box (yes, pronounced “sandbox”) will finally launch on Steam on April 28. The news arrived not with a big announcement or flashy marketing push, or any kind of fanfare at all—it just popped up quietly in a Steam page update.
It’s nice to have it official, but seriously, a SteamDB update is as close as we got to an official announcement:
The April 28 launch date is more of a refinement than a big surprise, as we’ve known for a while now that s&box would be out sometime in April. The bigger news dropped last week, when Facepunch announced that it’s signed a licensed deal with Valve that will allow s&box users to make games with it, then export them and release them as standalone games on Steam without having to pay Facepunch anything.
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There are still details to hammer out—”we need to create a license between Facepunch and the people shipping games, then double and triple check everything is legit,” the studio explained in its March 25 update—but getting things sorted with Valve was no doubt the big hurdle in the process. The arrangement will theoretically mean more Source 2 games on Steam in the future, though s&box uses a modified version of the engine.
As for why Facepunch doesn’t want to take a cut on the work it enables through s&box (unlike most other parties, for instance, say, Valve), studio founder and CEO Garry Newman recently told PC Gamer’s Chris Livingston that he has enough money—which is also why he hasn’t sold Facepunch to a bigger outfit.
Newman is also grateful for the opportunities he’s enjoyed through Rust and Garry’s Mod, and wants to extend that to others as much as possible. “That’s my main motivation now, is giving people what I’ve had, because I think Valve did it for me,” Newman said. “And Valve’s always like that. They’re always like, ‘How much money can we make for everybody else?’ That’s what their hat system is and everything like that. I think we should be the same, because everybody benefits.”
s&box on Steam still doesn’t have a price listed, but Newman told Chris that it will probably cost $20. Maybe $10. $10-$20, around there.
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