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Garry: “The Steam Workshop will save me seven thousand pounds a month”

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You know that nuke you just downloaded to Garry’s Mod? The SWEP that you wanted to make the world’s lolliest screenshot? You know how all it cost you was the tiny amount of bandwidth? It cost him a lot of money to serve that to you, all because he wants to make modding easier.

Garry has been attempting to simplify how people mod his game for years. He serves files both in-game and on the site for it. So he set up a site, www.garrysmod.org and an in-game precursor to Steam Workshop, the Toybox. His crusade to make the game easier to pick up has cost him a huge amount of money.

“That was the aim, to make it easier for people to install mods. It’s easier for us and its easier for them. You get less emails asking how to use a zip file.

“That’s why we like Steam Workshop, because one of our websites costs about $7000 a month to run. Once we get Steam Workshop, we can pretty much get rid of that.

7k, just so you can get higher resolution forehead on the G-Man? I wouldn’t begrudge him getting excited about the Steam Workshop. It’s surprising community support, but Garry learned over the years that the Facepunch community are worth supporting.

“I hated everybody and just wanted to ban as many people as I could. It’s weird: on the internet the more you punch someone on the face the more they want to keep coming back. We’ve got people on there we’ve banned 20 times.

“You’ll get one of these people, they’ll keep coming back, and you can’t get rid of them, but then they’ll do something really valuable for the community. Like they’ll make a game mode or something and you’re kind of obliged to let them back, then.”

Important,game-moulding things came from that hive of gaming. There are mods that have forever changed Garry’s Mod, propping up other mods and inspiring Garry to help make elements for the main game.

“Wiremod is a big thing.”, Says Garry. “I shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve installed it, I’ve looked at it and went ‘forget it’ and uninstalled it. But that’s something I want to do in Gmod 13, is add something so you can link a button to a light and then you press a button and the light comes on.”

So why not just ship Garry’s Mod with all this stuff that the community has made? Why not include Space Build, Wiremod, all the maps and SWEPs?

“My worry is that if I add too much stuff people will get confused. Whereas as it is now people can pick and choose what they want to install, and I think that’s probably the right way to go about it rather than everything you can possible get. That’s why we only shipped with two maps.”