u/MaximUtar

I’m convinced the s&box platform is fundamentally doomed. The fanboys keep making excuses saying "just wait for that ONE good game to drop," but it doesn't matter how good a game is if the pipeline to actually play it is pure cancer for the average gamer.

Right now, Garry Newman and Facepunch built a useless, bloated multi-step barrier that makes it impossible for players to actually come in in a scenario that there's an actually good game on the platform.

The $20 Paywall - Imagine charging twenty dollars for an empty, barren shell of an app in 2026. Roblox and Fortnite are literally free. GMod worked because it was $10 twenty years ago with Half-Life hype and it was the only "Source Engine sandbox" of its kind. Paying $20 for a glorified hub full of unfinished tech demos is a scam.

20GB+ of Cloud Junk - Before you even reach a menu, you’re forced to pre-install a massive chunk of cloud assets to "help you load into game faster", when 70% of games don't even use Facepunch cloud assets. (oh and let's not forget about the +2 GB flatgrass map the player has to download for the menu that doesn't even look good.)

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It feels to me that Facepunch is completely out of touch with the community and take eons to fix any underlying issues with the platform. It's like they don't care anymore and the s&box team is just piggy-banking off of Garry's bank account doing practically nothing all day.

There's this one saying that goes "Action speaks louder than words", and currently Garry doesn't take action or speak any words. It's impossible to know whether the game will ever be revitalized or if there's a plan to revitalize it if the guy at the helm has horrible communication skills.

It's not like the engine is good enough either to support making a fully fleshed title on it. We can't be babysitting Facepunch employees and having to make every single fucking issue about the most obviously broken shit ever. It pisses me off. THEY NEED TO USE THEIR ENGINE TO MAKE GAMES TO FIND FLAWS IN THE ENGINE, LIKE THEY USED TO! WE CAN'T BE HAND-HOLDING THEM?!

Either leadership needs to change (which will never happen), or Garry needs an awakening and start fixing this platform, cause I don't know what will save it if not Garry

You ever notice how Roblox rarely ever has any purely clicker or purely idle games (especially in 2D UI style)? The monetization process for games there is strictly manual approval only.

Now look at S&box, it's idle and clicker galore here because you can enable Playfund at the press of a button. Even restrictions by themselves on enabling playfund in s&box games just delay the inevitable instead of solving the "claude UI clicker made in 5 minutes" problem.

It's gonna stay this way if Garry doesn't do something with how games should get access to the fund. On a fundamental level, the Playfund system by itself works great, but grifters can get access to it way too easily and it doesn't help that there's a new Russian pyramid idling scheme with the "To the Moon" game where players are just paid out to play it just like Megashot with free skins and such.

So why can't we have strict manual approval for Playfund on games? You don't need that many human approvers/mods just to launch up s&box and play the game and decide if it should be Playfundable. Have a trusted orgs list as well, for big orgs that are guaranteed to not release slop like Small Fish, Ape Tavern, etc. etc.

EDIT: I did not say BAN every clicker and idle game in existence. Make it more enticing for developers to actually utilize the engine's capabilities and make great games that Facepunch is guaranteed to put on the fund, whilst making the easy shortcut actually unprofitable for the developer.