Braid has now been out on Xbox Live Arcade for an entire week, and the week has been a good success. The wave of highly-positive reviews took me by surprise, but the unexpectedly good sales show that this isn’t just a game for critics: a lot of people out there are playing Braid and getting good things from it.
I want to thank everyone for their support over the past week: whether by buying the game, telling friends about it, or just posting here with thoughts about Braid, it has all contributed to a successful launch. I hope this will serve as a useful data point for other independent developers: we can make games that are unusual, experimental, or personal, and there’s a substantial audience out there who will play and enjoy them.
Here are some numbers:
As I write this, there are 62,242 entries on the main leaderboards. I don’t have official sales numbers for the full week, but I would guess about 55,000 people have bought the game so far.
18,141 have completed the game (or at least gotten 60 puzzle pieces, since that is what the leaderboard shows).
528 people have completed the Full Game Speed Run. Of these, 238 have beaten the challenge time, and thus gotten all 200 Achievement points that you can get from Braid on Xbox Live.
Thousands of people have been playing the single-level speed runs. There are 5,098 people on the Leap of Faith speed run leaderboard, for example.
Sales are now slower than they were on launch day, but not too much: the sales didn’t just die after the first few days, as they do with some games. As a result, it looks like I will be able to make the next game, without needing to get a job that would interfere with that. (The estimated sales so far of 55,000 are not enough for this, but extrapolating into the future, the situation looks safe). Thank you, once again, for making that possible.
An open question now is whether sales will drop more steeply now that Bionic Commando: Rearmed is the new game on Xbox Live Arcade. I hope not, but we’ll see! If you have any friends who you think may enjoy Braid, please do let them know about it — perhaps while they are playing Bionic Commando, they can also try out the Braid demo.
