Developer Preview Registration Changed to Queue System

Yesterday, chaos ensued as Garry opened up Developer Preview registration as a timer-based lottery system. Today, he has changed the system to be a genuine queue, but there's a catch. You are placed in a queue for access to s&box based on your workshop contributions to Garry's Mod and Half-Life: Alyx.

Subscriptions on your workshop contributions will be taken into account for the aforementioned games. If you don't already have workshop contributions, you're out of luck - only contributions from before today count towards your queue placement.

The #queue channel topic in the s&box Discord

As the image above states, it appears Garry doesn't want to give one thousand keys out. What exactly this means is yet to be foreseen. Garry could stop the queue from giving out keys at a certain number, or slow down the key release time to a crawl once he is satisfied with the number of keys given out.

If you signed up for the queue and see your queue number go up, it means someone else signed up for the queue that was placed at a higher priority because of their workshop contributions in Garry's Mod or Half-Life: Alyx. Furthermore, you can check the queue as many times as you want now with no penalty, according to Garry in the Discord.

Backlash in the Discord

As the chaotic registration system keeps changing, many critics have emerged in the Discord. Many criticized the old lottery system, calling it unfair and confusing. Some even thought Garry was trolling or called the entire system a hoax. With the new queue system, many users are attempting to draw attention to the idea that workshop contributions for Garry's Mod is not a good metric for key access. Calling the Garry's Mod workshop low quality, a cesspool of stolen content, and more, users are pleading with Garry to re-evaluate.

Meanwhile, Garry has stated that access to s&box is a perk, not a universal human right. We reckon that no matter how the registration system was implemented, there would be unhappy people - it is impossible to please everyone.

Join the Queue

Anyone can join the queue by logging in to the developer portal with Steam. If you have a significant amount of workshop contributions in Garry's Mod or Half-Life: Alyx, there is a good chance you could receive a key in the coming days. Otherwise, you can still join the queue, but you may be out of luck.