s&box opens on Steam April 28 for $20 after closing an 800,000-user preview

April 28 and $20 are the two numbers that matter

Facepunch says s&box will open on Steam on April 28, 2026 for $20. The date and price came in the studio's April 15 update, and Steam's store page now carries the same release date for the Source 2-based creation platform. Facepunch still describes the project as its spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, but the important change now is simpler than that description: the platform finally has a public Steam date and a public price.

The preview closed, and most testers lost access

The same update also drew a hard line under the old preview period. According to Facepunch, about 800,000 people joined the Developer Preview, but only 40,000 accounts will keep access after the shutdown. The studio says retained users include developers who shipped games people actually played, players who bought cosmetics, and users who had meaningfully opened the game this year. That detail mattered almost as much as the price because launch discussion immediately folded in who was still inside the walls and who had just been locked out.

The PC floor is reasonable, but the recommended spec climbs fast

The Steam page lists a Core i5-7500 or Ryzen 5 1600, 8 GB RAM, and a GTX 1050 or RX 570 with 4 GB VRAM as the minimum. Recommended hardware moves to a Core i7-9700K or Ryzen 7 3700, 16 GB RAM, and an RTX 2060 or RX 6600 XT with 8 GB VRAM, with up to 50 GB of storage and OpenXR VR support. That is not extreme by current sandbox-tool standards, but it does separate basic play from the kind of heavier creation work s&box wants to encourage.

Reddit treated the trailer as a release checkpoint

At crawl time, the r/Games thread had 231 points and 93 comments. The mood was partly launch hype and partly cleanup talk after the preview shutdown. That split fits the moment. April 28 is not another vague trailer beat. It is the day Facepunch moves s&box from a giant gated test into a paid public Steam release.

Source: Facepunch update · Steam page · Reddit thread