Facepunch to Make S&box Free-to-Play in Shift to Curated Discovery

Facepunch Studios intends to take its s&box platform free-to-play toward the end of the year, with everyone who has paid for the platform set to receive exclusive Steam inventory items automatically, Facepunch developer Garry Newman announced in a post on the official s&box site dated October 13, 2026.

s&box became available to buy on Steam on April 28, 2026, according to the release announcement listed on the official s&box news index, which has carried weekly updates since, including a September 15, 2026 update that brought a price drop. The October 13 post is credited to Facepunch staff members matt, Lorenz, alex, egohead and nine others, with its main section written by Newman.

Free-To-Play and Player Compensation

Newman wrote that the platform is not well liked and does not have good retention, adding that he was embarrassed and ashamed by its reviews and that it had not been going well. He said the studio’s focus had been on the engine and the development experience, but that s&box is being sold as a game rather than an engine, so the focus must shift to what players experience instead of developers.

As part of that shift, Facepunch plans to bring the platform’s Sandbox game to parity with the Garry’s Mod version and then surpass it, adding more NPCs and vehicles, a first-class multiplayer experience, and support for addons and customization. Newman wrote that he had let down everyone who had been expecting that work, accepted the criticism and apologized, saying the studio would do better.

On pricing, Newman acknowledged that charging for access while also selling skins could put players off when combined with everything else, even though he did not consider the arrangement unusual on its own.

“We don’t need the entrance fee, we need players,” Newman wrote, adding that the intention was always to go free-to-play eventually.

Everyone who has paid for the game will automatically receive a set of exclusive Steam inventory items, with extra items for those who bought in at $20 rather than $10. Newman wrote that he hopes the items will justify the purchase price.

Discovery, Play Fund and Steam Workshop

Newman said Facepunch has struggled with discovery, namely which games to show and which to hide, and that AI made that much harder because it suddenly became very easy to produce a game, leaving players overwhelmed by choice and often downloading games they quickly abandon.

“My idea of a Netflix for games doesn’t work,” he wrote, saying people instead find games through recommendations, through active multiplayer games, and through watching streamers, influencers and content creators.

Rather than striving to be the platform with the most games available, Newman wrote, s&box should aim to be a platform with the best and most popular games, one where good taste and great opinions are valued above everything else. He described that kind of curation as a very human thing that cannot be replaced by AI.

The Play Fund has been flipped to a greenlight-type system under which creators must apply and be accepted, Newman said, because the previous self-enrolment system encouraged the wrong type of games and rewarded botting. Facepunch removed a number of games and maps it judged to fall below the new bar. The new policy, which Newman said is not set in stone, generally aims to discourage clicker, idler, slop and UI-based games and to reward games of the kind produced in a recent Game Jam.

Newman also wrote that building Facepunch’s own backend and its own version of a workshop had mostly been a waste of time and resources, and that the studio should shape everything to fit the Steam Workshop as much as possible. Maps are the first experiment: publishing a map now also publishes it to the Steam Workshop, and players can subscribe to maps, have them download while away from the game, and filter them in the map selector. Facepunch asked mappers to publish their maps to the workshop soon, telling them that once the full switch is made, players will no longer be able to find maps that have not been moved.

Citizen Removal and Update 26.10.13

The Citizen player model is being fully removed from the menu and the avatar editor, with the human model now the default everywhere. The Citizen still exists in the game, so games that use it will keep working, and Facepunch will update its own games to use the human models. Newman wrote that the studio tried to make the Citizen work for about a year longer than it should have.

The update ships a first pass of human model improvements, including new animations, LODs, eye color choice and climbing animations alongside a cleaner animgraph, with the developers describing the work as a continuing effort.

The announcement accompanies update 26.10.13, whose changelog lists 140 changes: 28 added, 41 improved, 65 fixed and six removed. According to the post, the 50 most played games drop from 46.3 GB to 36.3 GB in total, 22% smaller, and the 50 most played maps from 47.4 GB to 35.6 GB, 25% smaller, once creators recompile and republish their assets. Facepunch is also experimenting with cloud texture streaming, under which players join with lower-resolution textures while full detail streams in during play, a change the developers said cuts the initial download by 63% for the top 50 games and 82% for the top 50 maps.

Startup flow changes produced a measured speedup of about 60% on one developer’s machine, with similar speedups for the editor, the post said. Around ten separate performance overlays were replaced with a single all-in-one overlay opened with F11, and a new interactive GPU timeline was added.

Reworked network interpolation means that on a stable connection at 30 Hz other players are now shown 71 ms behind instead of 133 ms, while on a jittery connection the delay goes from 160 ms to 127 ms, according to the post. Private lobbies now enforce access through Facepunch’s own engine checks after the studio found that Steam controlled lobby visibility but not entry. Facepunch said it intends the free-to-play switch to take effect toward the end of the year.