The Witness Sells Well, Next Game "Maybe Bigger"
Review coming tomorrow!
I'd normally not care one jot about how many copies a game has sold, but there has been enough reportage of The Witness's budget that I can't deny I'm interested in how it fared. So maybe you'd also like to know that Jonathan Blow has said on Twitter that the game "is on track to sell more in a week than Braid sold in its first year."
Here are the tweets:
There aren't hard figures on how many copies Braid sold in its first year, but it reportedly sold 55,000 in its first week. According to SteamSpy (which can only estimate) The Witness has already sold around 45,000 copies at the much higher price of £30/$40, with likely many more sales coming via other stores and on PlayStation 4.
The Witness's initial budget was $800,000, but over its seven years of development that figure increased to somewhere around $6 million. It's not unusual for budgets to increase and in the grand scheme of videogame development $6 million is but a pittance. It's interesting in this case however as Blow was part of the first wave of modern indie successes who made a small game and hit it big. While most of his peers followed their hits with games of equivalent ambition, Blow put together a team and aimed larger with The Witness. It sounds like a gamble that's paid off. Even pirates are digging it.
If however you're still torn as to whether or not to buy the game yourself, we should have a review of The Witness for you tomorrow. When the time comes, just complete this maze in order to find the link.
