S&box plans to go free-to-play and embrace human curation saying "Netflix for games doesn't work"

Facepunch Studios plans to make its s&box platform free-to-play toward the end of the year as it shifts from offering as many games as possible to promoting the best and most popular ones. In a post on the s&box website , founder Garry Newman said the platform "is not well liked" and "doesn't have good retention". He said Facepunch had focused on the engine and development experience, but "we're not selling an engine, we're selling a game." Newman said he understood how charging for access while also selling skins, combined with other issues, could be "a big turn off".