Garry Newman just dragged his own baby through the mud on the official s&box site, calling the launch shit, the free weekend shit, and admitting the team fucked it by not being ready. The spiritual successor to the 25-million-copy Garry’s Mod is sitting at 47% positive Steam reviews six months later, drowning in AI-generated garbage while scraping by on barely 500 concurrent players compared to the original’s steady 30k. Newman’s mea culpa gets biblical — embarrassed, ashamed, “I’ve let everybody down” — as he pivots from selling an engine to promising actual playable sandbox parity with more NPCs, vehicles, and Workshop-style discovery instead of the Netflix-for-games delusion that never worked.

Facepunch tried damage control with anti-AI thumbnail penalties and Playfund tweaks, but the flood of low-effort slop buried anything decent and burned the GMod faithful who expected a true sequel, not a dev tool with monetized skins and a $10 price tag. Steam Charts confirms the grim numbers: all-time peak around 4.7k, recent months hovering in the low hundreds after the May spike. Newman now wants to go free-to-play by year’s end, handing paid owners some exclusive inventory items while shifting backend work to Steam Workshop and prioritizing human curation over algorithmic slop promotion.

The self-own is complete. A creator who built an empire on letting players make the game just watched his next one get review-bombed into irrelevance by the very tools and expectations he enabled. Burnt bridges don’t unburn themselves.