S&box, the spiritual successor the Garry’s Mod, has finally released fully onto Steam and it’s… well… it’s sitting at Mixed reviews. Nobody expected it to be a slam dunk on release, after all it’s a game that requires a community to fully flourish and create content for it, but there’s something more to this, AI Slop.
Essentially the main page for content in the game, advertising what modes and servers are available, is absolutely inundated with AI generated garbage designed to do nothing but exist and get traffic. The actual human-created content and curated mods made by the original devs are sitting right beside the usual garbage filled with that cartoon-style AI generated thumbnails and promising the world, only to provide a Flatgrass clone and nothing else.
So why this game in particular? Simple, money. The devs on this game announced a ‘Game Fund’ which essentially allows for the most popular modes and maps to receive a share of a growing pool of money every month to reward devs that make popular stuff that people like. Nice idea in theory, the problem comes with the issue that trying to make paid mods did, that people will try to game the system to just make passive income. As such, it doesn’t really matter for the quality of what they’re making, all that matters is making lots of things so that something will eventually end up near the top. It’s sad, it’s pathetic, but as soon as we knew about this paid system almost all of us knew where this was going. As such, despite the game being genuinely impressive with the amount of stuff you can do in it and what you can create, people with no talent will just flood it with AI generated stuff to try and find the passive infinite money generator. A sad state of affairs, and I do hope that the devs find a way to tackle this problem, otherwise I think I’ll just stick with GMod for now.
That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.