‘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.

“We’re not guided by commercial milestones, we’re not going to do an IPO,” says Facepunch. “We do this because we love it, we want to give the community the same opportunities we’ve had. We want to do that as fair and generously as possible. Without any corporate mischief.”

Part of that philosophy is paying developers who make games using s&box, and Facepunch says it has already paid out over $500,000 to game makers on its platform. “This isn’t as extreme as others but it’ll grow and is sustainable, since we don’t have to fire 1000 people to keep it working,” Facepunch says.

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.

Developers who build their games with s&box will also retain full control over them, and can even take them off the platform. Due to a deal Facepunch struck with Valve, “s&box games can be exported as standalone games on Steam,” the studio says.

“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.”

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