The Spiritual Successor to Garry's Mod Is Coming to Steam on April 28

Twenty years after Garry's Mod became one of PC gaming's great creative sandboxes, Facepunch Studios has announced that s&box — its long-in-development successor — will launch on Steam on April 28. The release date appeared not with a press release or trailer, but quietly in a Steam page update. Very on-brand.

The bigger news came last week: Facepunch has signed a deal with Valve allowing s&box creators to export their games as standalone Steam releases without paying Facepunch anything. The agreement required years of negotiation and Valve's sign-off, but it's now done. The first game expected to ship under the arrangement is My Summer Cottage, a Finnish life simulator that sounds precisely as unhinged as you'd hope. As for why Facepunch isn't taking a cut, founder Garry Newman is straightforward about it: he has enough money, and wants to give others the opportunities he had. "I think Valve did it for me," he said. "I think we should be the same."

s&box uses a modified Source 2 engine and is expected to cost around $10–20. Whether it replicates Garry's Mod's cultural footprint is anyone's guess — but the infrastructure for it is now in place.

French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir, backed by the Stop Killing Games initiative, filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft on March 31 over the 2024 shutdown of online racing game The Crew. The case was filed with the Créteil court and alleges that Ubisoft imposed "abusive contractual clauses" and engaged in "deceptive" commercial practices — specifically that players were never told their purchase had an expiration date. When Ubisoft shut down The Crew's servers in March 2024, the game became permanently unplayable. Weeks later, it began revoking player licences entirely, with no refunds offered.

UFC-Que Choisir, founded in 1951 and France's largest consumer association, isn't trying to bring The Crew back. The goal is to establish legal precedent — forcing publishers to be transparent about the conditions under which a purchased game can be switched off, and removing contract clauses that treat ownership as an infinitely revocable licence. Stop Killing Games, the campaign launched by YouTuber Ross Scott after The Crew's shutdown, has collected over 1.3 million verified signatures for an EU Citizens' Initiative. An EU Parliament hearing is scheduled for April 16.

This is the largest institutional push the games-as-a-product argument has ever had. A ruling against Ubisoft in France wouldn't just affect The Crew — it could force every publisher selling always-online games in Europe to rethink what they're actually selling their customers.

Max Hejtmánek, the English language editor on Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, shared a post to the game's subreddit claiming he was fired from Warhorse Studios after being told his position would become "obsolete in favour of using AI for all translations going forward." He worked on KCD2's English text for almost four years — dialogues, quest logs, item names. He says he had no warning before being called into a meeting and let go.

Hejtmánek writes that AI translation had come up internally before, and that he was always vocally opposed to it — but never thought it might cost him his job. "I feel incredibly betrayed by the management of the company I've come to care about greatly," he wrote. He asked fans not to review-bomb the game or harass other Warhorse staff. Warhorse has not publicly responded. Co-founder Daniel Vávra, however, has been publicly enthusiastic about AI — including suggesting games could be dubbed into all languages immediately upon release using the technology.

KCD2 won PC Gamer's GOTY award last year and sold exceptionally well. Whether Warhorse's approach to AI translation is unusual in the industry is an open question — but it's the kind of decision that tends to look different once someone puts their name to it.

Epic Games' latest round of layoffs — roughly 1,000 jobs — produced a story that's harder to brush aside than a headcount. Michael Maher, a programmer let go in the cuts, had been publicly outspoken about his situation: diagnosed with a rare illness called Castleman Disease in 2019, his treatment costs $17,000 a month without employer insurance. Losing his job at Epic meant losing the healthcare keeping him alive.

Following significant attention on social media, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney responded directly. "I personally made a mistake in approving these layoffs without a process to identify and address individual hardships like yours. I'm sorry," Sweeney wrote. Maher later confirmed he was being reinstated with benefits restored. A better outcome than most — but the episode throws a sharp light on an industry that has shed thousands of jobs over the past two years, largely without fanfare, and whose reliance on employer-tied healthcare means the stakes of a layoff aren't always just financial.

Crimson Desert has sold 4 million copies worldwide in just under two weeks — a striking result for Pearl Abyss's first singleplayer title. The studio announced the milestone on X, but the more interesting story is what's been happening around it.

The game launched to mixed reviews, with a Steam rating that opened at Mixed before climbing to Very Positive as Pearl Abyss pushed through a rapid series of patches. The biggest — update 1.01.00 — added five new summonable mounts, cut fast travel loading times, reduced the stamina drain that made flying feel unusable, and improved controls on foot and horseback. The result: a new Steam concurrent player peak of 276,261 on the second weekend, sitting third on Steam's most-played chart. At a shareholder Q&A, CEO Heo Jin-young acknowledged criticism of the story — "I think it would have been nice if we could have done a better job with it" — while confirming the team is pressing on with updates. Mod support and DLC have no concrete timeline, but a Nintendo Switch 2 version is apparently being explored.

Development cost reportedly came in at 200 billion won (approx. $133 million) across seven years. At 4 million copies and climbing, that's starting to look like a reasonable bet.

Death Stranding 2 PC pushes the sequel past 2 million copies sold, picking up 425,000 PC sales in its first week to add to the 1.6 million it racked up on PS5. It's been less than a year since the PS5 launch, making it the fastest Sony exclusive to make the jump to PC — beating Stellar Blade's 14-month window. Worth noting: Hideo Kojima says the original Death Stranding reached 20 million players. This one still has some ground to cover.

Stormgate is losing its multiplayer modes at the end of April after its server provider, Hathora, was acquired by an AI company called Fireworks AI, which is winding down game hosting to focus on "AI inference at scale." Frost Giant is patching in an offline mode, but online play restoration is conditional on finding a new partner — which, given Stormgate's concurrent player numbers, is far from guaranteed. The RTS crowdfunded over $3.5 million. Turns out the AI industry found a use for that infrastructure after all, just not the one anyone had in mind.

Disney may be moving to acquire Epic Games, according to tech journalist Alex Heath, who says senior Disney executives are actively pushing for the deal. The pitch isn't just Fortnite — it's Unreal Engine, which is already central to Disney's TV and film production pipeline. Majority shareholder Tim Sweeney could block any deal unilaterally, and by all accounts intends to. But new Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro mentioned Epic by name at a recent shareholder address, so the conversation isn't going away.

Skyblivion's team is hunting for "final, vital" veteran developers to get the Oblivion-in-Skyrim fan remake over the line this year. Six specialisms needed: quests, navmeshing, interior level design, 3D art, implementation, and sound design. The project was delayed to 2026 after a former dev accused the leads of rushing. The Nexus Mods post makes clear they want people who can hit the ground running — no onboarding time to spare.

Raccoin sold over 100,000 copies on Steam in its first 24 hours — a Balatro-adjacent coin-pushing roguelike where you combine special coins and items to trigger massive payoffs. Developer Doraccoon announced the milestone on Bluesky the day after launch. With nearly 20,000 new games released on Steam in 2025 alone, breaking through in 24 hours is no small thing.

World of Warcraft is getting its first official global pride event, the Darkspear Dash, arriving in patch 12.0.5. It's based on the Running of the Trolls — a community-run charity event that's raised money for the Trevor Project for 12 years. The in-game version runs June 27–29 and includes a tabard, a rainbow toy, and a Blizzard donation to the Trevor Project. A community event becoming an official holiday is a genuinely nice thing.

A gamer in Edinburgh claims they bought a £5 Xbox 360 at a flea market only to find it contained a GTA IV development kit with thousands of cut assets — unused radio tracks, early vehicle models, and most excitingly, the long-mythologised in-game ferry. A former Rockstar employee confirmed some of the assets are legitimate. Fans are now deep in the GTA Forums thread picking through it all. The console reportedly has a file called "Les_Home" on it, and yes, people are convinced it belonged to ex-Rockstar producer Leslie Benzies.