Update 26.05.13

A new update has been released, you can view the full changes on our blog post.

https://sbox.game/news/update-26-05-13

AI Thumbnails

I've been making a lot of changes to our Workshop so we can identify and discourage the AI Slop.

Our moderators can now mark packages as having AI thumbnails, which will reduce their prevalence in lists and searches. 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. So we're actively discouraging it.

I've added a warning to the thumbnail page about this.

Review Filtering

Last week I added a new review system which contains positive and negative tags. This week we started using those reviews and their tags to help out with discovery.

First of all, you can now filter by the rating. The star rating is generated from a combination of thumbs up and down and the actual review ratings. My hope here is that it's intuitive for people to find games that other people have enjoyed, instead of having to fight their way through games that no-one loves.

You can also filter by the prominent review tags. For example, you might want to play a game where everyone agreed universally that the story was standout, or where everyone liked the graphics. Hopefully that's a lot easier now.

I think this gives some good community-led discovery options that we didn't have on launch, but obviously we'll keep improving this stuff over time.

Steam Reviews

Our steam reviews obviously aren't great. They're painful for us. They are showing us where we have made missteps in the release.

Around 35% of the 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. I understand this, they wanted an iteration of Garry's Mod onto the Source Engine. They didn't want an engine and a platform. They wanted a Source 2 SDK, they didn't want a modern c# engine built on top of Source 2. 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.

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. There is probably something in that, for certain types of mods, and we'll look into it. We have a system in our Sandbox Mode where you don't need to subscribe to anything. If you want a weapon or an 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. Anyone can make these entities and publish them for anyone else to use.

Around 24% of reviews complained about AI Slop. I think I addressed this before. It's not our intention to encourage games created using AI. It's not our intention to encourage people making shit no effort games. But it's a UGC platform, there is always going to be dog shit. What we need to do is remove obvious trolls, discourage it and make sure it doesn't keep floating to the top. We are developers and this is our