When Facepunch Studios’ s&box, the game creation platform touted as a spiritual successor to Garry’s Mod, launched on Steam at the end of April, it immediately earned itself a “Mixed” rating on the platform, with roughly 45 percent of its reviews being positive. Reviewers mostly took issue with the overwhelming prevalence of user-generated AI-slop that littered the game’s discovery tab, a practice that Facepunch Studios is now “actively discouraging” with the release of s&box’s latest update.
Releasing a UGC game like s&box in the age of AI-generated tomfoolery was always going to be an uphill battle, but, based on the Facepunch Studios’ numerous disparaging comments about its usage over the past two weeks, it’s clear that even the devs have been somewhat blindsided by the never-ending torrent of slop that’s making its way into the game. Update 26.05.13 is a clear step towards tackling the issue, however, as Garry Newman stated that the team has now implemented several new tools that will help “identify and discourage the AI Slop.”
We’re punishing AI thumbnails – if your game looks like generic slop, it’ll rank lower 📉 We also talk about our Steam reviews 🫠 Plus FSR3 upscaling, a big physics update, review tag filtering and way more.https://t.co/hc1ysFxCAh pic.twitter.com/UasPVDXAJZ
— s&box (@s8box) May 14, 2026
“Our moderators can now mark packages as having AI thumbnails, which will reduce their prevalence in lists and searches,” Newman revealed. “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.”
Of course, as many commenters on s&box’s X post have already pointed out, discouraging the use of AI tools in the game is a treatment, whereas outright banning them would cure the issue altogether. However, as Newman previously stated in a comment provided to Rock Paper Shotgun, while Facepunch Studios believes generative AI is a “growing problem in every creative outlet,” it simultaneously acknowledges “that it’s a good learning tool and it’s a good productivity tool.”
To that end, it would seem that banning its usage in s&box isn’t on the cards for Facepunch Studios. At the very least, these new measures sound like a step in the right direction for s&box’s future, although it’s still hard to see how the game will ever manage to compete with its older brother, Garry’s Mod, following such a rough launch.
