The Witness, the open world puzzle game from Braid developer Jonathan Blow, is already doing well for itself.
Jonathan announced in a blog post that The Witness had already sold “substantially more” than 100,000 units and grossed over $5 million.
According to Jonathan, this is “a good chunk more revenue in one week than Braid made in its entire first year.”
However, it is important to keep in mind that Braid only launched on one platform initially before coming to Steam months later. Also, Braid was significantly cheaper at $14.99 (roughly £10), than The Witness’ $39.99 (£29.99).
While that may be a factor in the amount The Witness has made, it has still sold double the amount of units within the first week of sale. Even taking into consideration that The Witness is on PS4 as well as PC, this is still impressive.
Jonathan said, “This is great because as price goes up, naturally the number of units sold goes down. So the fact that we beat Braid by units, more than doubly, is a really nice success.”
Sadly he is under contract not to discuss specifics, but Jonathan did say that neither PC or PS4 dominated sales.
Despite that The Witness has made so much already, it’ll take a little more to bring Jonathan and the dev team Thekla Inc. into profit, as they blew more than $5 million to bring their dream to fruition.
“It is looking like, as time goes on, we should break even and make a comfortable safety margin on top of that, which will allow us to make more nice games in the future – unless some kind of world economic disaster happens.”
“We were trying to build a beautiful / interesting / intricate thing, first and foremost. The money just helps us stay in business in order to build new things. It is very easy on the Internet to read a financial posting like this cynically, so I urge folks out there not to do that.”
Jonathan also mentioned that he would like to bring The Witness to more platforms, and is seriously considering releases on Xbox One, Mac, iOS and Android.
