The Play Fund

If you make a game or a map and people play it, we'll give you some money. The more people play it, the more money we'll give you.

This is a way of monetising without encouraging each game to add microtransactions. My hope is that this will encourage people to make games that others want to play - rather than trying to make games that are the best at extracting money from you.

It depends. Right now we're funding s&box's development from GMod's revenue, because to me it's an evolution of Garry's Mod.

In the future I hope that S&box will be self sustained, from sales and cosmetics, and we'll take a chunk of its profits and stick it in the fund.

I also hope that we'll make the actual fund value public, but since this is still in the early development phase, I don't want to do that yet.

What about the scammers? The ones that are gonna make 300 new accounts and idle in a game to make the most money? What are you going to do about that?

Really? What do you fucking think we're going to do?

What about the grifters? The ones that are going to make games that lots of people want to play, and then make them want to play for a long time? What are you going to do about that?

These are called "Game Developers". I'm not going to be mad at people optimizing their games to make people want to play a lot. 

The algorithm is a tool. When games emerge that encourage people to idle in there, we'll tweak the algorithm to encourage other behaviour.

This is very much in development, and we're making it up as we go along. Getting this system in place was the first step.

Our next step is to get a payment system in place, so we can do KYC, tax forms and send money out. I'd expect that to be in place by the end of this month and, failing that, definitely by the end of next month.

We're particularly sensitive to people wanting to be paid out in obscure places, so when looking at a payment provider, the ability to pay out to as many countries as possible is on our mind. Obviously, if a country has sanctions against it, we won't be able to send money to people in that country until the sanctions are lifted.

You just need to publish your map or game, and then enable the Play Fund in the features. There's more information in the docs here.