Apparently, sales of Braid, Anniversary Edition were terrible: the game’s author himself, Jonathan Blow, revealed this in a series of videos that you can see “summarized” below, and in which the developer discusses what went wrong with this re-release.
According to Blow, the main problem with the Anniversary Edition was the desire to launch it on a wide range of platforms that, however, are no longer capable of producing results for this kind of content, with the sole exception of Steam which remains a point of reference for Braid.
The author explained, however, that in the specific case of the Anniversary Edition, even eliminating all consoles and mobile devices to publish only on the Valve store, the numbers would have been equally terrible.
In short, from this whole story Blow could only draw positive notes regarding the quality of the work that was done to relaunch the adventure and add so much content, work that unfortunately the market did not understand and reward.
An overall look
As mentioned, Braid, Anniversary Edition received excellent reviews from the international press, but this does not seem to have affected the game’s sales, and the montage below serves as an interesting analysis of what works and what does not work in today’s video game market.
Clearly, in light of the poor results of this re-release, it is unclear what the future holds for the Blow development team, which over the years has produced interesting titles such as The Witness and currently has at least one new project in the works.
The hope is that at least the agreements made with Netflix to bring Braid, Anniversary Edition to iOS and Android for subscribers to the streaming platform can limit the damage of such an unfortunate launch.
