Garry's Mod successor punishes gen AI use as creator admits "our Steam reviews obviously aren't great"

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The spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, S&box, became fully available on Steam for the first time just under two weeks ago, and generative AI became rampant almost immediately. Lead developer Garry Newman's now revealed protective measures against projects using such assets, while discussing the toolkit's current reception on Steam.

One change is that games featuring AI cover art will be suppressed. "I've been making a lot of changes to our workshop so we can identify and discourage the AI slop," he says in the update notes.

"Our moderators can now mark packages as having AI thumbnails, which will reduce their prevalence in lists and searches," he explains. "I can understand why people would want to use AI to generate these thumbs, since it makes generating them easy and fast, it does have the massive downside of making everything look like the same shit."

Latest Videos From s&box - launch trailer - YouTube Watch On

Newman adds Facepunch Studios is "actively discouraging" such practice, and a boilerplate warning is now on the thumbnail creation page. When it became clear this would be an ongoing problem the community was unhappy about, Newman addressed it by saying measures would be put in place, but he's wary of banning it outright because the whole point of S&box is to experiment.

Speaking of the platform's reception, Newman notes that the Steam reviews "obviously aren't great" and that "they're painful for us." He provides a statistical breakdown of what people are saying. About 35% compare S&box to Garry's Mod, which you'd expect. 24% complain about AI in one form or another. "It's a UGC platform, there is always going to be dog shit," he says. "What we need to do is remove obvious trolls, discourage it and make sure it doesn't keep floating to the top."

He notes that 20% of reviews point to performance problems, a "legit grievance" and something Facepunch is "constantly" working on. Then, he highlights the 12% who're talking about NFTs for some reason. "I have no idea what this shit is about. Of course we don't have NFTs or blockchain stuff, and never will," he writes in response.

Newman welcomes further feedback, as Facepunch works to address issues as they arise. You can probably save complaining about blockchain for somewhere that's actually using it, though.

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Anthony McGlynnContributing Writer

Anthony is an Irish entertainment and games journalist, now based in Glasgow. He previously served as Senior Anime Writer at Dexerto and News Editor at The Digital Fix, on top of providing work for Variety, IGN, Den of Geek, PC Gamer, and many more. Besides Studio Ghibli, horror movies, and The Muppets, he enjoys action-RPGs, heavy metal, and pro-wrestling. He interviewed Animal once, not that he won’t stop going on about it or anything.

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