If you can cast your mind back to around this time last year, you might remember Garry Newman—him off of Garry's Mod, and founder of Facepunch Studios—announcing that "Unity can get fucked" in the wake of sudden, badly thought out changes to the engine's pricing scheme that would have seen devs fork over fees on a per-install basis once certain "fee thresholds" were met.
Unity eventually walked back the most egregious aspects of those changes, but it's probably not surprising that Newman is more committed than ever to his kinda-sorta Garry's Mod sequel/brand new engine s&box, which has been in the works for years now. In fact, Newman spoke a bit about his vision for the engine in a recent dev blog.
"I don't want to pay Unity $500k every year so I can then pay my own staff to optimize and fix their engine," writes Newman, quite reasonably. Facepunch's other game, super-popular survival game Rust, has been based on Unity its whole life, but Newman has already said Rust 2 would be based on a different engine.
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"Unity has been good to us," he says, so it looks like bygones are bygones when it comes to those fee changes, "but I regret that we didn't always have our own engine being developed in the background… The long term goal is to be making all of our games on s&box, and to have expanded so the engine works on mobile/console/etc."
So Newman would quite like to stop paying Unity for the privilege of fixing its engine, which makes sense, but he also regrets that "the Garry's Mod community mostly have to leave Garry's Mod if they want to make money from the things they create in it."
Later on, Newman writes that "In Garry's Mod, if you made a popular game, the next step was to abandon the community and make a new version in Unity or Unreal. That fucking sucks."
That means a key element of s&box will be "A Garry's Mod type platform, where there's a list of games and you can jump between them. But this time providing a way for the game developers to monetise."
Which could, of course, open the floodgates to all kinds of dreadful shovelware. "Everything you download on iOS/Android app store turns out to require a subscription. Every Roblox game is pay to win. We need to do better than that.," says Newman, "Let people make money, but don't let it get predatory."
Which sounds easier said than done, to me, and would probably necessitate relatively strict moderation, but Newman hopes to lead by example. "For this to work we need games that get people sticking around. We're making games that will try to do that, and we'll be making an official sandbox mode too." There will also be s&box game jams to get devs' creative juices flowing.
Plus, Newman promises he isn't just trying to lure disaffected devs into his own financial bear trap. "We don't want the burden of collecting royalties or license fees. The platform and our own games should make us money. That should be our incentive." In what I can only interpret as a jab at Unity, he writes "I would also like to offer some assurance, legally, that we can't change the rules further down the line, when we get jealous about how much money everyone is making."
Which all sounds quite idyllic, so I hope Newman pulls it off. Over the last few years, it feels like the games industry has coalesced more and more around the two poles of UE5 and Unity, with other engines increasingly left out in the cold.
It'd be great if the engine that is—for all intents and purposes—Garry's Mod 2 succeeded in diversifying a bit, and treated devs better than Unity has been in the process. There's just one thing that needs to happen before Facepunch can let devs "use the s&box engine to create games, export them, give them away for free or put them on Steam," Valve has to say yes.
"We obviously need officially Valve to say yes to this, but Valve are cool, they get it, I don't think they're gonna say no. They just need to know what they're saying yes to—so our aim is to put a demo together and see what we can do." So keep an eye out for that, and if you want to try s&box out now, you can check out its developer preview on its website.
