Dear S&Box Team , I wish to bring to your attention a serious issue that is currently undermining fair competition and equal opportunity on the S&Box platform.
Certain games are offering guaranteed skins in exchange for playtime or daily login. This practice is unethical. No game on the platform should be permitted to offer guaranteed skins as a reward for playtime or daily login.
This system distorts fair competition and places independent developers and small teams at a severe disadvantage, regardless of the quality of their games. It turns the platform into an environment where guaranteed skin rewards have become the expected standard for player engagement.
Failure to prevent such unethical behavior will be an indication that it is supported. I therefore hope that immediate action will be taken to address this issue.
I respectfully request that the S&Box platform prohibit this reward system entirely and implement clear policies ensuring that no game is allowed to offer guaranteed skins in exchange for playtime.
I support that game developers who wish to give skins may organize occasional fair raffles or giveaways through their own Discord servers, forums, or official S&Box forum, without requiring any playtime or in-game activity in return. Such voluntary giveaways are acceptable promotional tools and do not distort fair competition in my opinion.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Games should be played for fun and enjoyment, not for material benefits or rewards.
ok, I didn't see any jealousy or malice here. S&box Player 1 simply expressed their opinion that this method of attracting people is unethical.
I disagree with that, but I'm curious to know what Facepunch thinks about it whether they'll change their minds, or perhaps disable PlayFund or make significant changes to it.
What surprised me more was your emphasis on "guaranteed" skins. So, as I've done in Hero World, where a random person gets a skin is that ok? But if someone is 100% guaranteed to get a skin for doing Daily is that bad? I might have misunderstood you, could you clarify? And yes, if Facepunch cancel this method, I won’t use it in my partner's games or in my own games.
So, following your logic, media people who can create their own games and attract their own audience to their games will also undermine fair competition and equal opportunities on the S&Box platform?
After all, ordinary game developers don't have media exposure as such, but people interested in creating their own game and attracting an audience to their game will have it, and you will also prohibit people from creating games, because in your opinion, this undermines fair competition and equal opportunities on the S&Box platform.
And why do you think this is unfair? Just buy items and distribute them to players. Everyone has that opportunity. Years from now, I'm sure entire gaming companies will be creating games, and today's developers won't have equal opportunities. This problem can't be eliminated; it will always exist in one form or another.
However, S&Box is still a developing and evolving system. Game owners receive their payments from the accumulated money in the Play Fund pool based on the playtime their games generate. We can think of it kind of like YouTubers earning from watch time.
Some clever game developers in S&Box have added a daily quest in their games that requires players to stay in the game for 90 minutes every day. The whole point is to keep each player in the game for a total of 630 minutes per week, so they can earn a larger share from the money that accumulates in the Play Fund. The entire system is built around this mechanic. The giveaway you made is NOT abusive like this.
The mathematics of this is simple, give a skin of $1.5 and get around $3-4 from the playfund pool in return, you can think of it as a kind of skin arbitrage. In the end, this whole system will evolve into directly giving skins to people in exchange for playtime — even if they just leave the game running in a completely empty map. :D While we're at it, let's give these genius friends of ours a brilliant idea: They should make a game called Idle Skins and just hand out all the skins in exchange for playtime with a sweet 300% profit margin :)
At its core Megashot's "reward system" is being abused to generate income from the Playfund. Give people $2 skins in order to pocket a couple more from the fund. If this continues, hundreds of games attempting to profit from this Playfund arbitrage will crop up. This does not promote game development, which I'd argue is the core principle of s&box.
The Playfund was created with the hope that people would make games others actually want to play. "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." -Garry
You could argue, reasonably, that adding incentives makes people "want to play" and I get that. Daily quests and battle pass style rewards have been around for years and when done right, they're a great idea. But, when the mechanic is built around this kind of financial engineering rather than game development, you're going to inevitably end up in a race to the bottom. "Developers" competing on how efficiently they can create slop and extract from the Playfund rather than developing quality games. That's a problem whether or not it's technically allowed.
All that said, a blanket ban feels short sighted. I think its clear that Megashot's model is purely designed to exploit and siphon from the Playfund. The Steam developer guidelines are a reasonable starting point that Facepunch could abstract and apply here.
I think what Megashot is doing is smart. However, none of this shit encourages quality development. A wise man once said there is no quality police and that should be up for the players to decide and a good metric of that is playtime, which the playfund is mainly based on as I understand. Ideally, 3rd party factors, like being paid to play, shouldnt be encouraged.
As Garry once said I think I need to get better at hiding games that are broken/shit/slop and do you think they'll ever make a thing you attach to your dick and it tests how aroused you are and in which way and then it'll show you videos that Ai is generating and it'll know if the videos are arousing you and it'll train itself on your dick blood movements and get better and better at arousing you until it can make you cum in like 5 seconds
@Arcev it detracts from the point being made. People who dislike cosmetics will innately look past the point to disagree because of that. Also your profile picture is an eyesore so that swayed my disagree vote too.
@Arcev it detracts from the point being made. People who dislike cosmetics will innately look past the point to disagree because of that.
Well if it helps, I do agree with S&box player 1. There is a sense of novelty when you DONT make games for money and instead make sure they are fun first. Money is secondary to cool experiences and people will soon see that fun games triumph over those experiences.
As for cosmetics, they reciprocate back to the community and its developers, there is a incentive for players to purchase their own and trade them on the market. When they first buy the cosmetic it indirectly helps other Developers by contributing to the PlayFund and the Creator of the cosmetic directly. Notice there is a clear distinction on the context of Money prio. Cosmetics? Go all out with trading, selfishly hoard them; good for community incentives. Games based solely on farming playfund? Its disliked in the community, overshadowed by better games.
Also your profile picture is an eyesore so that swayed my disagree vote too.
Completely agree, this is just slop to farm the playfund, genuinely surprised this is even still up, it's worrying for the future of S&BOX if this practice is allowed.
