"The whole game industry is having a hard time."
Braid: Anniversary Edition "sold like dogshit," according to creator Jonathan Blow.
Compiled in a video by YouTube channel Blow Fan, which I can report with some unease is exactly as Blow-devoted as the name suggests, Blow has been commenting on the sales performance of the indie darling platformer's remaster in Twitch streams since its release back in May. The clips that Blow Fan selected chart Blow's decline from initial optimism to grim resignation as sales failed to materialize.
On May 20, almost a week after the remaster's release, Blow was hopeful. Games, he said, tend to follow a predictable sales pattern: a large spike at launch, followed by a sharp drop to a gradually-decreasing sales baseline. From there, "it decays very slowly," Blow said, "and while it decays very slowly, that's a pretty reliable income for your company." While Blow said "it's not like we sold a million copies day one," he acknowledged that his team wasn't expecting a remaster to sell like a fully new game, saying "we just have to see where it lands."
Nearly a month later, Blow's assessment was dour. Asked on June 17 if Braid sold well, he said no: "It has sold horribly." He claimed that it was selling better than "nostalgic things like the Jeff Minter game that's on Steam, or Atari 50," but said that, broadly, the remaster had "sold like dog shit" compared to the amount of revenue needed "for the company to survive."
By late July, Blow had seen little evidence to shift his opinion. Asked on July 21 if he was happy with Braid: Anniversary Edition sales, he said "no, they've been terrible," although when a viewer mentioned they'd bought a copy, he amended his response to say "now they are terrible minus one." On July 22, Blow once again called them "terrible," but went on to describe his thoughts about potential promotional avenues and whether they might've helped with Braid: Anniversary's sales.
When asked whether Blow's company had promoted the Braid remaster at any conventions, Blow said it hadn't. "I don't think cons have any real value in terms of promotion," he said. However, he said cons have "a good value" in allowing a development team to see the public engaging with their work. "It's partly because your team gets to see people play the game and it makes it more real," Blow said.
The video closes with Blow's thoughts from July 27. Asked if sales are okay, he said, "No, they are bad. They are bad. The whole game industry is having a hard time." Responding to a follow-up question about how many people were working full-time on the compiler for his Jai programming language, Blow said: "None. Because we can't afford to pay anyone, because the sales are bad."
