It’s the day after the release of S&box, the successor to the legendary sandbox game Garry’s Mod: Reviews are mixed, complaints are plentiful, player numbers are a fraction of Garry’s Mod, and Facepunch Studios says in a post-release update that everything is going “pretty much exactly as expected.”
“The backend went down once or twice. One time we accidentally DDOS’ed ourselves, and one time we had to scale some services to meet demand,” studio boss Garry Newman wrote. “As it usually is in these scenarios, the services that got overwhelmed weren’t the ones we had considered at all.
“Our current mixed review status (44%) wasn’t unexpected. It’s the reason we didn’t want a frontpage takeover or any other push from Valve, because we wanted people to find this organically—not have it sold to them.”
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Performance is another big issue: Facepunch is working on it, but interestingly it’s opting not to make use of many modern rendering technologies. “Most modern engines spread rendering work across multiple frames. 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,” S&box developer Matt explained.
Facepunch also “made a bunch of money” off of S&box’s launch day—you can see the detailed breakdown on the studio’s finance page, but the headline number is nearly $1 million in one day—and so it’s doubling the Play Fund, which is paid out to community developers based on engagement, to $1 million.
Alongside the update from Facepunch, there’s also an update to S&box itself—the patch notes are below.
