// PC GAMER — GAMING
Garry Newman responds to s&box criticism in lengthy YouTube comment: 'I don't like giving up on things, I am stubborn'
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Facepunch founder Garry Newman (Garry's Mod, Rust, s&box) gave an emphatic, extensive mea culpa to the s&box community in a YouTube comment. Newman was responding to the latest video from Eridium, "S&box's Free To Play Weekend Isn't Enough," a highly critical state-of-the-game from the s&box-focused creator.
Facepunch's recently-released user generated content (UGC) platform has been billed as a Garry's Mod successor in the age of Roblox, but has struggled in its first five months on the market. Eridium's biggest critiques, as I understand them:
Here's Newman's own response in full, copied from a pinned comment under Eridium's video (you can also check out Eridium's own follow-up from earlier today):
"I like the citizen, I have liked the citizen and I will like the citizen. It gave the game and the platform an identity. Some people like it, most people don't like it. I do still strongly believe that if we were an indie studio making our first game with this character that people wouldn't bat an eyelid, but because we're being compared to Half-Life 2 it's an issue. I wanted to keep doing more with it, to try and improve it and get it to a place where it's likable.. but I think I'm done trying now and we're just going to get rid of it and push the human characters forward.
"I don't like giving up on things, I am stubborn, if there's a problem I want to find an elegant solution. We have obviously dedicated a lot of time and effort into it so there is a sunk cost fallacy there. It's at the point now where I can see it isn't going to change and we're going to have fewer headaches if we just switch totally to humans, so we'll be doing that over the next month or so [emphasis mine].
"There being too much content is a problem. It's no good having 20 good games on the platform when they're swimming in the sea of 500 tech demos and clickers. We're going to address that, we already have plans. We're changing Playfund so it's not incentivising it.
"We're going to switch to a Workshop subscribe/install model for maps and games. We've been trying to have a system where we show you 200 games and let you choose - and it's not what people want. Even if there are 50,000 awesome HL3 quality games, no-one actually wants to choose that way. That's apparent now, that's become really clear.
"The launch was shit. The free weekend was shit. We wanted to float under the radar on launch and build up, but we didn't. It was crap, it has burnt bridges and made people angry, it's given a negative view of s&box, it's turned the gmod community against it. We can't get away from that, we fucked it. We weren't ready and we fucked it. We know that, you know that, we fucked it.
"We have had conversations about hiring you [Eridium] a few times. The conclusion we've always come up with is that you're more useful to us as an independant. We don't want you thinking you can't make videos like this calling us out. We don't want you to stop holding us to account. We're well aware that you're the only YouTuber that really covers us extensively.