Quick crash on S&Box in the last few years. COMPLETELY, ignore the “gmod successor” comment.

Absolutely garbage, horrible optimisation (their trailer even features the game dropping below 30fps.) that gate keeps the majority of people ever touching this “game.” 32gb ram minimum recommendation. They’ve had 2 years of closed testing for this and it only gets worse to run.

Limited time cosmetics released in a developer preview over the course of 2 years that now have individual prices of $100+ (probably not for long, considering the “game” is kind of , mediocre at best.)

Worthless documentation until recently, where apparently it’s still absolutely terrible.

AI infested, NFT/Crypto bro community who are 95% of the official S&box discord and reddit and forum. Literally every, single, damn day is ai slop vibe coding arguments and anyone who doesn’t specifically want to use AI art etc is treat like garbage.

Toxic as hell community who actively bully / review bomb games, for example the Tycoon game that was popular as hell in the dev preview, was both targeted by a dude who decided “black hat for fun” and mess with the saves / gameplay ONTOP of the dev discord going out their way to specifically link it and review bomb.

Every game mode that has seen any fraction of success here, is a copy paste of other games prior. The only game that could be worth buying made with this engine, is going to release stand alone.

“Develop and publish straight to steam, for free” is extremely misleading- there’s still a $100 publishing fee involved.

Since the exported game HAS to be published on steam, it’s probably a good idea to mention the extra $100 behind it.

To explain, this game engine specifically says under their publishing section “Publish and export your games, Completely free, to steam”. After coming to a deal with valve.

This is straight up untrue.

I’m completely fine with the price, but when your game engine has a mandatory publishing fee yet your website is stating, in it’s publishing section that it’s completely free to publish to steam, that’s misleading.

Limited cosmetics that weren’t even announced to have an expiration date at launch.

The entire “games” premise, is Roblox 2.0. This is not a joke or exaggeration, the entirety of this game is almost a 1-1 of exactly what Roblox has. Except in this you pay to play poorly optimised, unfinished games most devs haven’t worked on for the last year.

Unoptimised maps and downloads, some maps are 7gb, some are 10+gb. Good luck playing a mode with multiple maps for the first time.

Server filtering, finding games in progress, seeing lobbies etc is an utter nightmare.

The party system is, giga jank and has a tendency to drop half your lobby in a game while the others get left behind.

Did I mention they published a “paper crown” that they priced at $100? Or did I mention servers can literally toggle it so you can wear whatever the hell you want so you don’t actually have to spend anything?

The Playfund was being hard botted before the release, for those who aren’t familliar - the more popular your game is / played, the more developers get from the playfund. This is the exact same format Fortnite uses, and Epic TO THIS DAY is struggling with the exact same pitfalls of a billion bots generating garbage games content.

If you’re wondering how bots can be that prelevent when the game is $20. If you bought a $0.75 skin in the dev test, which you could just click and be allowed in on, you owned the game. We had “3k” players at a point during the dev preview, and only 80 total on servers.

Ai slop galore also. And I’m not particularly sure what audience they were catering for with Terry.

One thing that helped Gmod boom was Lua being a more simple language. This time it’s c#, which is wayy more rough for newbies.

This one’s just a guess, but I feel like if a big game did come out of this, and it’s released as standalone - then S&box itself wont actually grow its players from it.

Lastly, there’s a LARGE portion of reviews that are from “Devs” for this game who have never created a single thing, yet have an extremely vested interest in selling their limited cosmetics at high prices, one of the reviews here is even by the infamous mod who was banning people for genuine criticisms that didn’t break any rules (he has “5k” hrs in two years…)

To cap it off - one of their devs just said that’s there’s nothing they can do vs ai. And that they can’t prove games used ai. So the Ai slop game list of right now is permanent.

So in all honesty, run, avoid, flee or whatever. If I didn’t get this game buy buying a cheap skin, I’d feel like I was stolen from, and would have refunded.