Tribetoy‘s game now has a public sales target to reach that it has to reach to avoid being a financial failure.

Matthew Hoesterey, Tribetoy‘s founder, held an ask-me-anything on Reddit regarding Bow to Blood. It’s a PlayStation VR-exclusive game where ships fight in an arena for survival in a sci-fi setting. Instead of controlling the ship directly, you have a robotic crew to handle, and you can also self-defend if it is required. The AI enemies are randomly selected in each match.

„We need to sell around 28,000 copies at the current non-discount price to break even, and that’s not counting me living off my bank account and not taking a salary for two years. We get to decide if we discount the game but work with Sony to determine when that is done. So realistically with sales factored in we probably need to hit 40,000 sales before we earn any money toward the next project.

The PlayStation VR has a tiny user base relative to non-VR games, so we probably get fewer sales then we would making a flat game,” he writes. “That said we love VRrrrrrrr and are not doing this to get rich,” Hoesterey wrote.

Sony helped to finance the game (but we don’t know Bow to Blood‘s budget!), which is why they will take all the money until the development costs are paid off – after that, Tribetoy gets a 30% cut. „It was a very generous deal. Most of the time developers get much less, but VR deals are a bit better as the user base is smaller, so it’s harder to break even,” Hoesterey added.

Bow to Blood launched a month ago, and it’s respectable that Tribetoy‘s boss is this transparent about a sales target – major companies only discuss such subjects in their financial reports. We need more people in the industry like Hoesterey!

Source: VG247