Facepunch Studios, the creator of the popular survival game Rust and the sandbox game Garry’s Mod, released a new project this year. s&box was supposed to be a new game platform, a “spiritual successor to GM,” but players flooded it with many negative reviews.
Recently, developer Garry Newman held a “free weekend” event, during which everyone could get acquainted with s&box. He then published an emotional appeal:
s&box is free this weekend... I know you hate it and you hate me for happily working on it, but now you can try it for free and really understand why you hate it so much.
The promotion didn't particularly help increase the audience: from the usual online figures of 400-500 players, it briefly increased to almost 800 users, but then began to fall again.
Recently, the developer again spoke about s&box in the comments under one of the videos about the game. He admitted the unsuccessful launch:
The release was ****** [terrible]. The “free weekend” too. We wanted to stay under the radar during launch and gradually gain momentum, but it didn't work out. Everything was bad, it burned bridges, angered people, formed a negative perception of s&box and turned the Garry’s Mod community against it. There's no escaping it: we messed up. We weren't ready and we failed everything. We know it, you know it – we messed up.
Many players in s&box criticized the character models, as they reminded them of sausages. Garry also spoke on this topic:
I liked and continue to like the [citizen] model. It gave the game and platform recognition. Some people like it, most don't. I still firmly believe: if we were an indie studio releasing our first game with such a character, no one would bat an eye. However, since we are compared to Half-Life 2 [models from Garry’s Mod], it becomes a problem.
Garry said that he would like to work with old models and improve them, but now he thinks that it is still worth using human models.
I wanted to continue working on it, improving it and bringing it to a state where people would like it… but I think I'm giving up: we'll just remove it and bring human characters to the forefront. I don't like to give up, I'm stubborn; if there's a problem – I want to find an elegant solution. Obviously, we put a lot of time and effort into it, and in this case, the sunk cost fallacy is already at play. Now I see that the situation will not change, and we will have fewer headaches if we completely switch to [normal] human models – which is what we will do over the next month or so.