I hope Blow can afford piss breaks now
After being in development since what feels like the dawn of humanity, Jonathan Blow’s The Witness is doing pretty dang well for itself. Not only did it get almost universal critical praise (nabbing a 10/10 in Destructoid’s review), it’s also apparently selling spectacularly.
In tweets made by Blow, he announced that The Witness is on track to do better in its first week on all available platforms than Braid did in an entire year.
It’s looking like his next game, due to be released sometime between now and the inevitable heat death of the universe, is well on its way to being funded:
It’s hard to talk about numbers without breaking NDAs, but The Witness is on track to sell more in a week than Braid sold in its first year,
— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) January 31, 2016
and Braid was a hit indie game! (I’ll let you know if this officially happens!) Which is not to be too money-oriented, it’s just great that
— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) January 31, 2016
we’ll be able to make the next game at a comparable budget level (maybe bigger, we’ll see!)
— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) January 31, 2016
I’m genuinely surprised by this. An indie puzzle game released at a relatively high price point, and as a result is also being pirated to hell and back, is still managing to outsell Braid, one of the games that was credited with starting the great ‘indie boom’ a few years ago.
Just goes to show how having the means to fund development, as well as owning a massive bottle to piss in, can pay off in the long run.
