We’re not kidding, Blow was actually that blunt in his opinion of how Braid: Anniversary Edition did sales-wise.

The Blow Fan YouTube channel has compiled a video of Jonathan Blow’s comments on his Twitch broadcasts since Braid’s release in May. In the chronologically juxtaposed recordings, you can see that Blow was initially very optimistic, but later the opposite is true.

On May 20th, barely a week after the game’s release, he was still hopeful: “Sales are gradually dropping after a huge drop in interest at launch, from where they are not dropping much, but despite the small drop, it can still be a reliable income for the studio. Blow said that they didn’t sell 1 million copies on the first day, nor did they expect the remaster to reach the level of a new game, and they are just waiting to see “where they land” later.

On June 17th, they already announced that the sales were terrible. It did better than, say, the Atari 50 or Jeff Minter’s game on Steam, but the Braid remaster sold like “dog s**t” compared to the amount of money it would have taken to keep the company afloat. On July 21, Braid: Anniversary Edition did even worse before a viewer bought it. Blow responded by saying that “sales were terrible, minus one”, so it was one better. On the 22nd, he also rated it terrible and was asked if he could have improved the results with some marketing.

He thinks that if he had taken the game to some events, they would have had no promotional value, but he thinks that these events have good value in terms of bringing the development team and the public together. It makes it more real for the developers because they get to see people playing their games. Finally, you can see his thoughts from July 27 in the video. According to Blow, sales are down and the entire gaming industry is struggling. How many people are working full time on the Jai compiler? Nobody, because they can’t afford to pay salaries, sales are so bad.

At least he’s honest, right?

Source: PCGamer