‘We don’t have to fire 1000 people to keep it working’: Facepunch Studios says paying s&box game developers is sustainable, with ‘$500,000 paid out to date’
Facepunch Studios’ new game creation platform s&box will release next week on April 28 on Steam. Built on Valve’s Source Engine 2, s&box is the “spiritual successor to Garry’s Mod,” a physics sandbox and toolkit users can build their own games in.
Leading up to the launch, Facepunch Studios stated its community-forward vision, highlighting features like payments to game developers and the ability for devs to export their games from s&box and add them to Steam—without Facepunch taking a percentage.
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The payments come from “The Play Fund,” a pool of money which at the moment is generated from Garry’s Mod’s profits, though “Our hope is that one day s&box will be able to stand on its own two feet, and the fund will grow with its success.” The Play Fund pool is distributed among developers with the most popular games and maps—you can learn more about it on s&box’s monetization page.
“We don’t ask for any royalties for this. No hidden percentages, no rug pulls, your work is yours. This means that if you make a popular game on our platform, you’re not stuck—if you can make it standalone, you should.”
“We’re trying to give people the same chances that we’ve had… we do everything not for ourselves, but for the community,” says Facepunch Studios CEO Garry Newman. “By elevating the community, we elevate ourselves naturally. We have faith in that because that’s what happened to us. Everyone can win.”