s&box has reminded me how much of a dick garry newman is
fuck you, i won't do what you tell me! even if it's what i had told you i was gonna do!
now playing: sandopolis zone act 2 - sega sound team (sonic 3)
this one is very, very much.. uhm.. "editorialising", we'll generously say. i get very vitriolic in this one! if you don't want to see me bitching for ~3400 words, get out while you still can, sailor!
s&box is, in no uncertain terms, a complete and utter failure. i'm sure it will eventually find an audience of some variety, but that is in no way going to be even remotely comparable to the previous juggernaut that was garry's mod. i suppose that garry newman himself doesn't want it to be like garry's mod either.
in a blog/news post, a few members of the team for s&box had emerged to discuss some of the more pertinent issues that the game is facing currently. first up: the rampant use of AI thumbnails. yes, the game hasn't even been out a full month yet as of writing, and the games market is already positively saturated with next-to-nothing but AI dogshit. and whilst the reaction for easy PR - doubly so for an indie game - would be to simply axe all AI involvement, monitor the attempted releases closely as to ban the use of AI, and for bonus points, transparently add some degree of human appeal to the process just in case of things being unfairly caught as AI despite being made by human hands. that is the simplest way to handle this situation to make you look good! piece of piss.
so instead of doing any of that! garry tackled this part of the post - oh, no.
there's a lot of dancing around words in his statement.
"moderators can mark packages as having AI-generated thumbnails..."
okay, good start!
"which will reduce their prevalence in lists and searches"
what? no! have it entirely fucking remove them? what are you doing?
"i can understand why people would want to use AI to generate these thumbs..."
awww, and there it fucking is, man! i thought that we had learned from this!
yes, i suppose garry's not actually heeded the prior shedload of advice he received after making expectedly-childish comments on it prior.
"my thoughts on ai programming are basically the same as porn. so like, if you use too much porn, you lose your ability to ejaculate using your imagination."
wow! this really was a funny chungus way to explain it! let's coast off of this newgrounds-era sex joke line of thought for another 20-odd years, right? it's clear that you have yet to change at any point in that time, so why should have anybody else, right? but i feel as though i'm getting distracted - why would this have been of special note if it was just a case of garry newman saying something stupid and unfunny? that's a dime a dozen. what did he-
"i don't mind AI that much, because it makes my job so much easier."
oh. great. so we have, going in to s&box, an expectation set that AI is kind of entirely fine actually. but now, because of the fact that it's directly in the game, and it's not something that you have to go reading through articles to find, now it's a problem. now it's something being directly associated with s&box, and is rightfully tarnishing it's reputation because of the fact that little is being done to dissuade people.
so the reaction to that, then, is to mildly dissuade people? not to entirely do away with AI? i imagine on the basis that being that hypocritical would likely be an even worse look again, because i don't doubt that garry is still plugging away with chatGPT over there, given the way he addresses these things. the funniest part is, in that interview, he does briefly touch on it:
"i know a lot of artists are sensitive over AI."
yes! sensitive because it is putting them out of a fucking job! sensitive because it is destroying years of their work because a machine is receiving what they have done with their life, and shitting out a facsimile that a lot of people are unfortunately racing to call superior because it's an infinite source of it with no time constraint! sensitive because people in decently well-off positions, such as you, are indifferent to the fact that it is a scourge on the field of creativity, wholly ignorant to the fact that it is actively making people less intelligent to consume it! you couldn't give a fuck, because why should you? it's not targetting your field of work and it's not something that you believe is bad, therefore it isn't. you'll make scant and brief mention of the fact that people think it's bad, but you're not actually going to hear them out on that fact because you already made up your mind. funny, that. foreshadowing!
but foreshadowing aside for the moment, let's look at another example of garry receiving advice and just simply ignoring it! when the whole garry's mod steam workshop nintendo DMCA fiasco was happening, a lot of passionate people were quick to make several page-long documents on the precise information that could be ascertained to ensure that this was being done by bad actors, and was no act of any officially-sanctioned party at nintendo. garry was like no actually i don't want to read that. we have to take these things seeeriously you know. oh by the way answer these questions answered in literally every other document that i haven't read. it's this; it's this utter willingness to actually listen to people before it's a far larger issue that makes newman so fucking infuriating. his wish for people to clarify it for him in his twitter comments (again, as opposed to reading the LITERAL GIGABYTES OF DOCUMENTS he had been sent by concerned fans at this point) came five hours after him already having made a tweet saying that he had been assured it was real and was going to go ahead with the takedowns. what changed? oh, i know - people were already starting to very loudly tweet about how garry's mod wouldn't be the same, or as fun, or even something worth keeping installed to them without the nintendo addons. so immediately alarm bells started ringing and he needed to do this... non-chalant acting damage control. mind you, this is only because it was a very loud group of a fair few people; there are several things that he still cannot be swayed on, despite there being clear evidence to the contrary of literally every single one of his held opinions that he treats as fact. and of course, because i'm me, i'm going to point to his contempt of linux!
yes, perhaps one of the most utterly braindead things he's went on to parrot about for years on end, garry claims in yonder reddit comment that he'd be better off having not released garry's mod on linux, because it has caused him nothing but strife. he then goes on to mildly gloss over the fact that they "don't properly support it" being the source of said strife, which, if his tone is to indicate anything, he feels is an illegitimate grievance. hmm. advertising something as one thing, only for it to not function in that way? again. foreshadowing! regardless, he then goes on to self-defeatedly and sardonically conclude that "our attempts to release our games for linux are shit and aren't appreciated". okay, so... what? you're saying that the work that you're doing is shit, the people agree that your work is shit, and instead of maybe, say, continuing to support it - you know, because you've claimed at the head of this post that it's "the right thing to do" - you are going to throw your hands up and claim that it's our fault, actually, for expecting something that you told us we were getting? i can understand the qualms of having linux take second priority to windows, absolutely. but the idea that its on us for "not appreciating it" when, no, a large portion of people just have grievances with the fact that you are pushing a build of the game that doesn't fucking work, is so ridiculously up-your-own-arse that i can't even fathom how you would reasonably come to that conclusion. plus - if you really did just want to wish it away, why not remove the build entirely? especially today - proton now exists and entirely supplants the need to run the linux build of garry's mod, especially seeing as there has been no attempt in the nigh-on decade since these claims were being made for any better support of garry's mod to take place. better yet - rust, also published by facepunch studios, has had even other people in facepunch erroneously claiming that "linux is better for cheaters." yeah, i'm sure! just look at all of those windows exclusive games that have no cheating problems! i'm so sure that you're right, man. call of duty is basically synonymous with cheaters on PC and it hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of running on linux thanks to its invasive anti-cheat. same with valorant, fortnite, league of legends, and countless others! to say this is to admit that you have no actual care for an anti-cheat program; you want a set-and-forget solution and to let god sort 'em out.
and i suppose that utter indignance for what people actually want, and what you tell people was going to happen comes to a head with this final part, here: a section of the post that sees garry addressing s&box's steam reviews. this had ought to be juicy! we already know that he has flagrant disregard for people giving constructive criticism and feedback if it's criticism that he personally disagrees with, so let's dig in, shall we?
"around 35% of reviews compare the game to garry's mod. they point out the differences between s&box and garry's mod, they wish it was more like garry's mod."
yeah, i think that this is a wholly reasonable expectation for people to have. especially considering that weeks before you released the game, you ran a poll regarding a potential name change, and one of the options was garry's mod 2, an option that went on to win by a landslide, which had 24,953 votes. the second place was s&box, with a miserly 7178. you would think, then, that this would have served as more than ample evidence that people were seeing this game as garry's mod, and were following the development of a game similar to garry's mod from the garry known for his fucking mod. nobody wanted another fucking metaverse game in line with roblox or fortnite uefn. they wanted goddamned garry's mod to get a source 2 iteration. hell, you clearly wanted to capitalise off of it, given both your twitter poll, and the fact that the icon of the game - the very thumbnail of this post - just so happens to be lowercase white text on a blue background. i wonder what the icon for garry's mod is, again?
"i don't think we can win in that argument, it's going to be an expectation and preference thing. my only real hope is that eventually everyone will realise that this is a much better way to work for developers, and we'll end up with much better content because of it."
okay, thing is about that, the whole appeal of garry's mod in the first place was that it was fun fuckabouts with anything you could get your hands on from either the source engine or the steam workshop (we'll touch on that in a moment!). it was never about the in-depth tools; yeah, you have lua as a scripting language there, for the people who are dedicated enough to go ahead and make mind-blowing mods and maps and gamemodes, and that itself was the fun - you bought garry's mod, and you then subsequently had access to a toybox of fun assets, and somebody else could sometimes come up with a cool new way to play with the toys. the base fun of garry's mod was derived from the source engine, the fact that you had all of the already lauded physics of half-life 2 to play with in an environment that was a lot more l'assez-faire than half-life 2, and was more likely to have shenanigans ensue because you can physgun dr. kleiner and barney and start doing odd re-enactments of the sooty show if you fancy. or just run around shooting each other! or make great towering buildings! the whole point, to reiterate, was indeed that it was a sandbox and that anybody could start creating, and the extra mod tools were there to supplement it. i'm glad that developers get a better swing of things, but what is there to offer here that wasn't already being offered by platforms such as roblox or fortnite uefn outside of the idea that you could maybe release your game to steam? which itself is somewhat diluting the whole appeal of these metaverse types of games to a lot of people - again, it's inconsiderate towards the player. the player is supposed to be able to open the game, pick a server with whatever gamemode, and go. if those servers have mtx, memberships, or whatever else going on to monetise themselves, that's up to those server owners. that's how that ship has been run for going on 20 years on the garry's mod side of things, with no sign of slowing down, and in fact it might even be bolstered by just how fucking miserably shit s&box is for the player who doesn't want to make grand sweeping mods or games and just wants to play some shit with their friends. dreams was a flop for media molecule. it had a very expansive toolkit that you can do impressive, truly jaw-dropping things with, but it ultimately alienated players due to that largely being the appeal of the game, as opposed to their prior offerings in the littlebigplanet series which offered those as a bonus enhancement to an already-existing game, that just so happened to contain user-generated content in droves. that's the difference, to me; you go from having user-generated content exist to enhance the experience to relying on user-generated content to be the experience, and it all falls apart. garry's mod stood by itself as being better than jbmod not because it had any modding capabilities of its own from the beginning, but because garry's mod came as a result of seeing that - funnily enough - jbmod wasn't getting updated or listening to player feedback. it made a better base experience, which then later facilitated people making mods for it. you would think that garry would do well to remember that his career was kickstarted off of him coasting off of somebody's already done work and then simply doing it again but remembering to update it and tweak it every now and again, especially considering that rust and now s&box have both become the butt of a fuckton of jokes on account of them being built from the ground up and being largely unfun exercises in frustration. but who am i to judge?
"around 27% of reviews think we're missing workshop integration. they liked the way you used to subscribe to stuff out of game and then join the game and have all those mods."
yes, because you were looking through and curating your own experience, or, alternatively, you were having an experience pre-curated for you with workshop collections, whether those be from friends looking to do a game night, or complete strangers who had a nice little tidy set compiled to have fun fuckabouts with. again, this is a matter of leaning too heavily on your ugc; he goes on to mention that "we have a system in our sandbox mode where you don't need to subscribe to anything. if you want a weapon or NPC, you click on it, and it downloads and spawns it. i guess this appears like we're shipping all this stuff with the game.. but we're not." yeah, and if it appears that way, if it all populates a huge list when you think that you're just interacting with the base game, and then a bunch of bullshit shows up, it's going to be overwhelming. imagine if you pressed Q in garry's mod after a fresh install and it showed you every single entry on the steam workshop in your list. that sounds fucking horrible and like it's going to make your game lag to high hell, too.
"around 24% of reviews complained about AI slop. i think i addressed this before."
yeah, you did "address it" before; in a very unsatisfying manner. for a game that is based on creativity, and one that is relying on that creativity even more than garry's mod already did, it seems antithetical to even allow AI generated content in any capacity. sure, it'll allegedly sink to the bottom of s&box's own ratings system, but what the fuck does that matter? the bottom of a top ten list is still going to be visible. if there were already, like, a few hundred or thousand s&box creations of high quality, fine, the cream would rise to the top, but as we are currently, there isn't a high enough install base to warrant people creating for it, and therefore there aren't a lot of people outside of those AI slop artists who are going to be making anything, because why would you invest effort into a laughing stock that has no plans to entirely rid itself of AI? plus - an AI thumbnail can weigh it down to the bottom, sure, but if those same AI-abusing people are able to, i don't know, simply ratings-bot it to the top, something that has been an issue with virtually every UGC platform ever, even the most well-funded ones, it is at best disingenuous to argue that this is in any capacity a well thought out solution with longevity beyond the weekend. but again, of course you can't do away with it entirely, because it would be hypocritical as hell! garry makes liberal use of AI in his coding - can't entirely get rid of it, now, can we?
"around 20% of reviews complained about performance. this is a legit grievance, we have the data to back it."
what? okay, positive side first, i am at the very least glad that he had the willingness to admit fault on the disastrously bad performance of the game, we're talking like, 20FPS on a 3060 kind of bad. it's frankly fucking inexcusable to have launched in this state, but sure, whatever, if you're aware of it and you're going to go ahead and try to fix it (maybe get somebody who actually writes code entirely of their own volition as opposed to generating some of it to optimise), then good.
that second part though! "this is a legit grievance"? what, so everything else up to this point was baseless? you don't think that it's a "legit grievance" to see that you, yourself, propagated the idea of this being garry's mod 2, and it being lambasted rightfully due to in no way living up to those expectations? you don't think that it's a "legit grievance" that people are seeing the catalog of games available right now, seeing that it's all AI dogshit, and rightfully disavowing it because your moderation up until you've been forced to do something has been laughably poor to allow this through? with anybody else, i would be cynically "waffles-to-pancakes"ing right now, but with garry, as we've seen previous, i truly don't fucking know! i really do not know if he is saying that the actual reasons that s&box is being blasted in reviews right now are entirely stupid or if he just has dogshit phrasing! but given his track record, i really would not be surprised if it was the former! he has a history of having a personal disagreement with a certain criteria under which several people criticise him and so just simply not doing anything about it, so what's to say that today is the exception?
finally,
"about half the people that reviewed negatively went on to play more. 6% of them played for over 10 hours. one french guy played for 280 hours after posting their negative review."
yeah, it's funny that, isn't it? how people are still playing the game because of the fact that they want it to improve, and clearly already have some degree of affection for it? in some circles, we'd call that "appreciation"! but no, if we've learned anything previously, it's that any sort of indictment or criticism absconds you from enjoying the game and just means that you're an unappreciative lout, right? i truly do not know why he added this section. it baffles me! what is it supposed to convey? what, that people are, god forbid, displeased with a game and wish to give criticism, but still enjoy it? zut alors! i could have never fucking seen that one coming! it's not like you never meet an MMO/GaaS player who is without criticism of the game that they effectively play as a job, and yet despite their grievances, still play it! it's not like people lambast grand theft auto online and yet it's still lucrative a decade and change later! it's not like people for years said that garry's mod used to be better, but still kept playing it! i really don't know what the fuck he's getting at!
in some degree of conclusion, garry newman is a bit of an asshole, s&box is yet another metaverse game that is going to be kept that way and will subsequently become a sinking ship that will eventually be abandoned and they'll jump ship back to garry's mod (mark my words on that). and if and when that does happen, garry will complain for years about how he thinks it's everyone else's fault for not understanding. because that's the kind of douche that he is.
