got recommended a video on s&box and how it compares to garry's mod in terms of use as a development tool
it got me thinking about the sliding scale of games and platforms that rely on user generated content -
there's very clearly a place for games with minimal coding experience required
there's also a place for games which use an actual game engine for creating content
but i wonder how much room there is now for something trying to be intermediate
the video mentions that s&box uses c# for scripting, which brings it more in-line with unity and will make it easier for new developers to move from s&box to unity when the time comes, which is a noble goal. but i'm curious how many creators who previously would have made a gmod map as their first thing instead now make a vrchat (or similar) map as their first thing and so are already using unity itself, even if there's a lot of things they don't have to deal with or can't do due to platform limitations
its hard, in many ways, to feel like that s&box isn't just Facepunch, essentially, privatizing the announced-in-2015-source-SDK-for-all meant to compete with Unity & Unreal. I don't think this is because facepunch is doing so to be evil or anything, I just think valve probably went "oh, we dont want to be in that line of work" since it would require, y'know, being responsive to clients using it which is a huge mess.
Especially with no revenue model- it makes sense that facepunch would fit in as experienced middlemen.
the problem is like.. s&box doesn't really feel like a modding platform (I'd argue gmod's strength was that it was a Half-Life 2 PLUS! Mutators for your favorite valve IPs) which s&box doesn't have. It's a great toolset! it's great to finally have access to source 2... but to do what, exactly?
it's deeply unclear to me what the business model is here, what the value is. Facepunch isn't doing this for charity- and while yes, they have RUST to rely on for income, that won't last forever. so what, monetized minigames? Do you really want to make games that will be forever trapped inside the s&box executable with no way to launch externally?
It's sitting at this very awkward junction of Fornite Universe / Roblox where you still have to go into someone's walled theme park to get there. It's the worst of both worlds! given how powerful and advanced it is, but the inability (as of now) to commercialize anything- why not just spend that effort making things for Unity/Unreal/Another Engine where you can actually use it to make money.
Yeah, I can see a lot of young devs getting started here- I also see a lot of exploitation on platforms like Roblox, now with Epic joining in via fortnite. It didn't work for Second Life, Blue Mars.. so on and so on it won't work here. In a world of easily accessible professional grade engines, what motivation is there to play around in these UGC sandboxes? How is this not just Little Big Planet, or Dreams again?
I'm not trying to be a downer here, me from 10 years ago is probably very excited about this, me right now? not so much. what's the pull here? (beyond rapidly develop concepts & test them in multiplayer, but holy shit is everything so broken in s&box rn in a very "am I back on Gmod 8 kind of way")
maybe its not for me! that's totally fine- but who is it for, exactly? what is Facepunch's gameplan other than "Surf on the good will of being great engineers who got lucky twice forever and hope it works out"
legit- this would make 1000% more sense if they'd just say, put all the rust content in there! I'd happily muck about with Gmod: Rust Edition but instead they've become "well.. its sort of a source 2 sdk except you cant use it for anything except experiments and it's too complicated for casual mucking about"
like grats, you have now made a research platform. and you can't really monetize it without engaging in enshittification or very complex legalities of paid mods with a terrible onboarding process
"oh well you see to play my favorite game you gotta uhh... umm.. buy s&box then you gotta uhhh find my thing in the server browser then you gotta-" "im gonna go play vrchat later man" and even the vrchat folks got laid off.