Rust dev is bored of paying Unity '$500k a year' to fix its engine and promises that his Garry's Mod successor won't hoodwink devs with fees

Gaming IndustryGame DevelopmentGarry’s ModRust dev is bored of paying Unity ‘$500k a year’ to fix its engine and promises that his Garry’s Mod successor won’t hoodwink devs with feesWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Facepunch Studios)

Garry�s Mod screen - G-Man riding a balloon-festooned cart with his hands held above his head while a Counter-Strike guy chases him

If you can cast your mind back to around this time last year, you might remember Garry Newman—him off of Garry’s Mod, and founder of Facepunch Studios—announcing that “Unity can get fucked” in the wake of sudden, badly thought out changes to the engine’s pricing scheme that would have seen devs fork over fees on aper-installbasis once certain “fee thresholds” were met.

Unity eventuallywalked backthe most egregious aspects of those changes, but it’s probably not surprising that Newman is more committed than ever to his kinda-sorta Garry’s Mod sequel/brand new engines&box, which has been in the works for years now. In fact, Newman spoke a bit about his vision for the engine ina recent dev blog.

“I don’t want to pay Unity $500k every year so I can then pay my own staff to optimize and fix their engine,” writes Newman, quite reasonably. Facepunch’sothergame, super-popular survival game Rust, has been based on Unity its whole life, but Newman has already said Rust 2 would be based on a different engine.

So Newman would quite like to stop paying Unity for the privilege of fixing its engine, which makes sense, but he also regrets that “the Garry’s Mod community mostly have to leave Garry’s Mod if they want to make money from the things they create in it.”

Later on, Newman writes that “In Garry’s Mod, if you made a popular game, the next step was to abandon the community and make a new version in Unity or Unreal. That fucking sucks.”

That means a key element of s&box will be “A Garry’s Mod type platform, where there’s a list of games and you can jump between them. But this time providing a way for the game developers to monetise.”

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Which could, of course, open the floodgates to all kinds of dreadful shovelware. “Everything you download on iOS/Android app store turns out to require a subscription. Every Roblox game is pay to win. We need to do better than that.,” says Newman, “Let people make money, but don’t let it get predatory.”

Plus, Newman promises he isn’t just trying to lure disaffected devs into his own financial bear trap. “We don’t want the burden of collecting royalties or license fees. The platform and our own games should make us money. That should be our incentive.” In what I can only interpret as a jab at Unity, he writes “I would also like to offer some assurance, legally, that we can’t change the rules further down the line, when we get jealous about how much money everyone is making.”

Which all sounds quite idyllic, so I hope Newman pulls it off. Over the last few years, it feels like the games industry has coalesced more and more around the two poles of UE5 and Unity, with other engines increasingly left out in the cold.

It’d be great if the engine that is—for all intents and purposes—Garry’s Mod 2 succeeded in diversifying a bit, and treated devs better than Unity has been in the process. There’s just one thing that needs to happen before Facepunch can let devs “use the s&box engine to create games, export them, give them away for free or put them on Steam,” Valve has to say yes.

“We obviously need officially Valve to say yes to this, but Valve are cool, they get it, I don’t think they’re gonna say no. They just need to know what they’re saying yes to—so our aim is to put a demo together and see what we can do.” So keep an eye out for that, and if you want to try s&box out now, you can check out itsdeveloper preview on its website.

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Yakuza/Like a Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi says his studio’s new game won’t be that big after all: ‘it’s not modern to have similar experiences repeated over and over again'‘Calm down!’ says Facepunch Studios: Garry’s Mod successor s&box is getting a fan-requested sandbox mode and an alternative to ‘Sausage Men’

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Yakuza/Like a Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi says his studio’s new game won’t be that big after all: ‘it’s not modern to have similar experiences repeated over and over again’

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‘Calm down!’ says Facepunch Studios: Garry’s Mod successor s&box is getting a fan-requested sandbox mode and an alternative to ‘Sausage Men’

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