Yes, we received US$5.5 Million from Benchmark Capital last summer and are now up to about 17 people.  (Forgive me, we are continuing to add new people to the company, and I don't know if this new guy is *officially* working at the company as of right now just yet.)

And no, we're not sticking to the original game idea (this is probably what you mean).  Former TGCer Asher Vollmer, PuzzleJuice creator, noted that the game will be huge and will take a long time to develop.  We were initially planning to make a smaller game than Journey and then decide what to do from there, but the game continues to change.

The same thing happened with Flower and Journey (flOw was just based off the PC version), so don't be worried.  :)

I would work for you, the only thing i need is a place to sleep and warm food occasionaly

I understand that. I'll google myself to see if there's anything interesting.

Hope you don't mind sticking around.

I actually live in Tokyo right now (moving to Korea for three months tomorrow), so I really need to get to sleep now.  (On that note, it's cheaper to live in Seoul and Tokyo than in Los Angeles...)

Indie games on the PSN and XBLA haven't been doing so well.  I don't know of/can't say specific numbers, but a lot of games aren't selling that well.  Papo & Yo is an example of a game that sold decently well on PSN, but didn't recoup it's investment.  They effectively used the PS3 release as a way to advertise their PC release, which will end up turning the game into profit.

As for AAA games, what has happened over the past 7 years is many major publishers just aren't developing games anymore.  They're basically developing one game.  THQ didn't go out of business because its games weren't profitable (well, some weren't, but that's another story), it went out of business because it was pumping so much cash into all of the games it had been making.  The people were trying to run the company like they were back in the PS2/Xbox/GC days, where development costs were lower.  It's much harder to run out of funds when a game costs $10M than when it costs $30M.

Look at Sega, EA, Activision, etc.  They all used to publish hundreds of games a year, but now each company only has a handful of releases.  I am too tired to look at exact numbers, but the PS2 at this point in its life cycle had something like 4-5 times the number of games than the PS3 does.

I was a huge fan of the .hack series (there was no second series, just like there was only one Matrix movie).  Each of the four games sold... 250,000?... copies on the PS2, and Bandai was like, "Holy bukkits!  This is awesome!"  Nowadays, if a disc-based release sells 250,000 copies, it either had an extremely tiny development budget or the developer is going out of business.

You guys got almost as much money as Ebay did from Benchmark. I heard they do most of their business as split ownership split profits. Are you self publishing the next title then? Also will TGC own this IP or will Benchmark?

I think that you guys should work only for Sony and that's what i want. I cant believe you guys would stab Sony in the back like that by going multiplat!!

naw i'm kidding =P

I love Love LOVED Flower and i appreciate the type of games that you guys make. also, do you mind sharing your thoughts on what Sony is doing with the PS4 and how they're being open to independent developers? They are supposedly forcing other companies to break down their harsher barriers towards independent developers aswell

Please tell us more

This was my favourite part of your post.

Also, thanks for coming on here and clearing all this stuff up.  Really interesting.

Ironic enough this game was the result of Sony funding the game, NOT with the dev self publishing.

Good.