12mo ago

Braid: Anniversary Edition has sold so poorly that "the future is uncertain" for Jonathan Blow's company

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12mo ago

Braid: Anniversary Edition has sold so poorly that "the future is uncertain" for Jonathan Blow's company

www.rockpapershotgun.com /braid-anniversary-edition-has-sold-so-poorly-that-the-future-is-uncertain-for-jonathan-blows-company

24 comments

Jonathan Blow seems like a creative and talented individual that likes to waste time doing apparently nothing and arguing on twitter.
- He did zero marketing.
  
  Maybe, but it's also something very few people were looking for. The advertising I saw was basically "the old braid looked worse than you remember". OK, but it didn't have enough replay-ability to warrant a second purchase, and that's not considering all the modern indie games it's competing with.
  Then there's the $20 price point, which it hasn't quite earned. It's more expensive than the Beyond good and evil anniversary edition.
  Here are some other games that are similarly priced: (steam below £16, ignoring sake price)
  Project Zomboid
  Phasmophobia
  Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
  Slay the Princess
  Fallout: New Vegas
  Noita ...
- His arguing hasn’t helped him to maintain is image either. It’s hard for me to respect the guy, which makes me less inclined to buy his games.
- He’s a really great engineer. I think he’s just too in the spotlight for his own good.
- He just like me fr
Not really surprised. I bought it and it didn’t seem all that improved over the original version. It was a cash grab that failed.
- Its a good game, and was especially so for the time it released. However, it’s also the kind of thing that once you’ve finished there’s not much reason to go back and do it again. Maybe after a decade I would play it again for $5, but its not so fun that I would drop $20 on it.
  
  As a fan, 20$ is surely the wrong pricepoint for it, unless it's one of those strategies that I'm seeing popping up more and more about having the dyiehard price followed quickly by a 50% cut (that's just the reasonalbe expected price).
- I've never played it and that's exactly what it seemed like from the article. Anytime a audio/developer releases an Anniversary Edition or something similar it's just a cash grab that plays off of people's nostalgia for the game (I'll admit, I've bought Skyrim multiple times) and usually doesn't change much, if at all.
  
  At least Skyrim, for all the general re-releasiness, was bringing the game to new platforms (VR was great BTW, even if I didn't play it super long), and the additional PC release moved it to 64bit, which there was an actual reason to do. They milked it for sure (and fuck their paid mod system), but there were legitimate reasons to buy the new versions.
  I don't know what the reason to buy this again would be.
So in 16 years, they produced two games and a remaster. Am I missing something? Of course you can't keep a business alive when it doesn't actually make anything.
He knows you can only solve puzzles once, right?
It's a great game and it was groundbreaking in the indie space, but you can't just live off the one game forever. Imagine if Toby Fox did that with Undertale. And then complained about not having money.
- I mean, until Chapter 3+4 releases, Deltarune has been free to play.
  He's just merchandised the shit out of it and Undertale.
  
  If you can pull it off, successful merchandising is far more lucrative than the original media. A tale as old as consumerism.
- Stardew Valley, Minecraft
  
  This is the only realm where ConcernedApe and Notch have any commonality
  
  Terraria too, but all have continued to get a shit ton of content added over the years.
The last I heard of this guy he was claiming that COVID was man-made.
WiiU-style bad naming, perhaps? I had no idea "anniversary edition" had redone art assets.

24 comments