The dedicated server work has begun, you will find a sbox-server.exe in the game folder now. This is a work in progress, and isn't fully functional right now. I feel like there's a few reasons people want a dedicated server right now, and I want to talk about them.

They maybe think that the only way to monetise their game is via a VIP system on a dedicated server. That's fine, but I view this as an old fashioned notion. We will provide other, better ways to monetise in the future.

So maybe you're writing a gamemode and want to write into a database or something on your server, so the game is long lasting. You don't want people to get the database credentials. Yep. That's fine. I don't think we have a way for you to write serverside code right now though.

I suspect though, that if you're running code on your server, it doesn't need to be sandboxed and whitelisted anymore. I suspect that by doing that you can do whatever you want - like read a config file, or environment variables, or load other assemblies. So I don't see this being a big problem, it's just a goal we need to reach.