Gabe Newell just changed the game, again

I've been in a toxic love-hate relationship for the past 10 years with Unity. Surviving the infamous runtime fee, the layoffs, and the overall out-of-touch management. Because no other engine could meet my high standards of being fast, flexible, and simple. Until now. Because the creator of the Garry's Mod just secured a deal with Valve to ship commercial games made with Source 2, Valve's own game engine, to Steam for the grand price of free. Guys, it's free. And honestly, I think people are sleeping on what this actually means for indie games. But why should you care? And why should Unity and Unreal be shaking in their booties? Well, to understand that, we need to quickly rewind. Oh my god, my eyes. Source is the original proprietary engine developed by Valve to make games I'm sure you've never heard of, such as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, and least importantly of all, Garry's Mod. Made by this guy, Garry Newman. I assume the naming was very well thought out. Running Facepunch Studios. Now, it was pretty revolutionary at the time with its advanced moddable physics sandbox gameplay. That's a mouthful. Facial animation systems and multiplayer. If you were alive and remember the 2000s era of insane Garry's Mod videos, then congratulations on being a dinosaur. Just kidding. I was alive, too. Now, here's the important part. That same guy, Garry, decided to make a successor to Garry's Mod cuz he was probably like super rich by now and following his dreams. But instead of starting from scratch, he took Valve's own Source 2 engine and built something new on top of it, creating something to be highly community-focused, flexible, and open source. So now, anyone could contribute to it if your code was good enough, obviously. And this was called S& Box. And if you were silly enough to Google it like me, it stands for sand, S and sandbox. But there was one massive problem stopping this game engine from dominating. You see, Source 2 wasn't exactly open source. See what I did there? That was pretty cool. So, you couldn't just build a game engine on top of it and ship games on Steam without Mr. Gabe's explicit permission. He wants money. See? Money. Now, you may be wondering why Valve didn't just make Source 2 public to begin with. Well, it's really simple. They're freaking rich. They don't need to. They're making so much money off of Steam, and you think they're going to go and make a game engine, have to maintain it constantly, and deal with the developers who are super entitled. Actually, no offense to developers, aka me. Yeah. Valve's known for keeping things simple in their expensive yacht. And only more recently have they started to spread their wings to hardware, such as the Steam Deck and the virtual reality headset. And now, S& Box. So, how did Garry accomplish getting Mr. Gabe's permission, was known for being notoriously private, to say yes to a licensing agreement that lets developers build games in sandbox and publish them on Steam completely royalty-free? Well, I mean, it never hurts to ask. What's the worst they can say? That's a meme. I don't know if you can read it. But in this case, Mr. Gabe said yes. Important to know that Source 2 is still closed source and that sandbox built on top of it is open source. Now, there is a small caveat to this agreement that I'll get to in a second. But first, why does this decision even matter? And why should Unity and Unreal, the current top dogs of the game engine space, be barking with fear? Now, I'm not including Godot, but honestly, it should probably be scared, too. Because anything that's approved by Valve, you know it's going to be good. Freaking amazing games. They are the unsung heroes of the collapsing game industry, constantly reinvigorating the space with a new tech, non-greedy prices, and arguably the best platform for indie games to find an audience. I think I mixed up the slides here. What's unique about sandbox is that it's not only a game engine, but a game. Similar to Roblox, but much better. It follows the games as a platform model. So, like Roblox, you download sandbox and inside you get access to thousands of user-generated content made by the community, except without the plastic boxy graphics, the screaming crying children yelling skibidi or 67 every 3 seconds, or the predatory currency system that can take up to 70% of every cent that a creator makes. Yeah. Let that sink in. Instead, sandbox actually bans paywalled content entirely and only allows monetization in the form of in-game

cosmetics for questionable-looking characters. And similar to Fortnite, they have a play fund which distributes to different games and maps depending on the hours of playtime while using the revenue from Garry's Mod to fund it. Now, if you're like me, then you might have raised an eyebrow there because being funded by one game alone isn't exactly a long-term business model. And Garry knows that. But they've been building this for 10 years already, and this isn't some random startup burning cash, but instead it's Garry's baby, his passion project. And if Godot can be purely sustained on its community donations and its cult-like following, then sandbox has a much bigger commercial runaway to work with, especially now with Valve's approval. This work gets interesting for developers because sandbox isn't just competing with Roblox, but with Unity and Unreal, too. Now, my frustration with Unity was never really about the money. Actually, they gave me a free pro license key when they invited me to their small group of Unity insiders. That's me. And said it was the feeling that the people running Unity had stopped caring about the opinions of the people building with it. You know, the indie developers, the group of people who helped made it so popular back in 2005. Now, I want to make something clear. The actual developers and community managers inside of Unity have been doing a great job, and honestly, they've just been keeping the ship afloat as long as they can. So, they do deserve a big round of applause. But instead, it's the addiction of higher management to shiny object syndrome, like blockchain and AI ever since Unity went public on the stock market and care more about investor money than about the years of feature requests ignored by developers and packages shipping half-baked and staying broken for years. Only recently, with the new CEO and what seems like a new focus on Unity 6, does it feel like the ship might actually start to turn around. We'll see. And while Unreal doesn't have nearly as much drama, they're still a very large company that depends on the revenue of one specific game, Fortnite, which isn't looking so hot. So, on one side you have an engine recovering from an identity crisis, and on the other side, one bankrolled by a game that peaked in 2019. And in walks this guy, Garry Newman. He created sandbox with built-in multiplayer from day one, not as an afterthought like most engines, along [clears throat] with a character customizer, and added a huge library of cloud assets similar to GMod. It even supports visual coding called action graphs, making the barrier to entry super low for anyone who's ever wanted to make a game but didn't know where to start. And for the more experienced developers, the sandbox engine is constantly on the cutting edge, supporting the latest version of C#, a hot reload functionality so you can actually see your coding changes in real time, an easy-to-use shader graph to recreate all of those cool effects you see in games, and their Hammer editor, which is an extremely cool name for what it actually is, which is Valve's own level editor, but they customize it to make it easier to use and moddable. Now, one of the most annoying parts about Unity is that they are closed source. Unless you are a really rich company willing to part way with an arm and a leg to access it, and then only can you read it. So, if you see a half-baked feature, you'll either have to wait for them to fix it or write it from scratch yourself. And even with Unreal, you have to request access to their source code, and good luck navigating that mess of C++. Couldn't be me. But with sandbox, since it's open source, you can easily customize it to your needs, and great community contributions can go a long way. And from examples like Godot and Blender, open source seems to be a sure fire way to make the super nerds really appreciate your software. With the deal made between Facepunch and Valve, you can now make a game in sandbox and export it directly to Steam with no fees and royalties. Well, of course, after Steam's 30% cut, you can't forget that. Compared to Unity, where you have to pay for a pro license if you make over $200,000 every year, and this is per developer, per person on the team. Or even with Unreal, you have to pay 5% royalties after you make a million dollars. Now, it doesn't sound like a lot, but when you add the 30% cut from Steam, the 60% cut from the publisher deal, and then the 30% cut from the IRS, the taxes, whoever's going to take your money for the government, then you're not really left with a whole lot. Huh. Which is even worse for indie developers whose games might not sell millions of copies to recoup the loss. Heck, the game that I just published with my friend that took 7 months to make sold like 100 copies, made like 300 bucks before all the deductions. And the math is not looking good there, guys. And after 10 years with Unity, this potential new partner is looking very attractive to me. It has the language I like. It's fast, and it's free, and they're regularly updating the engine, always listening to the feedback from

its community. And for the first time in my career, a game engine hits all three corners of this triangle: good, fast, and cheap. And you're only supposed to select two of these. It seems that Garry didn't get the memo. But it's important to know that the contract is not final, so things can still change. So, before making any big decisions, it's best to sit back and wait for the finalized deal. But while Garry and the lawyers are doing their thing, what does this actually mean for the future of indie games? As a game developer myself, I see this new engine becoming the main choice for indie developers going forward. With the low barrier to entry, we'll see a lot more people trying to make games. And since Sandbox by default has more high-quality graphics and more polished games on the marketplace, the games will be less sloppy than their Roblox counterparts. We'll see a lot more games on Steam and a lot more multiplayer experiences, since it's so easy for it to just work using Sandbox. Since they use Steam's networking layer. A lot of developers using Unity, Unreal, and even Godot will most likely switch to Sandbox as its community grows. Although people will still choose to stay on those engines because they do support exporting for consoles and mobile. And then you'll have people creating their own version of Sandbox since it's open source when they get fed up that not every decision is going their way. And honestly, after 10 years of waiting for an engine that treats me well, doesn't leave me on red, and doesn't try to gaslight me, I think I'm finally ready to start seeing other people. But if you're looking to tell the difference between and Unreal now while we wait, boy, do I have the video for you. One of these. Mine might be that one. I don't know.