Braid: Anniversary Edition "sold like dog s***", says creator Jonathan Blow | Hacker News Reader

Braid: Anniversary Edition "sold like dog s***", says creator Jonathan Blow

eurogamer.net

47 pointsamichail108 comments

I bought it and enjoyed it, and appreciated the commentary.

But I was a bit irritated by performance issues I experienced with the time bubble later in the game. They eventually got patched, but considering the amount of rants Blow has about performance (+ the fact the game is not actually new), it kind of soured me on it a bit. I guess his attitude eliminated any sense of good faith I would have to a developer releasing something with bugs.

Making yourself a public figure when you run a company is such a double-edged sword.

Does it use opengl like the original? If that's the case, it could be a driver+gpu bug. Such things are pretty common.

Pretty sure it was a memory leak or similar related to the slowdown of the audio in vicinity of the bubble, it definitely became worse the longer you played. Whatever it was got fixed though.

Maybe it's the particles? Almost everything in the game uses deterministic particles, but they don't work with the ring, since the particle's properties are no longer just a function of time, but also of the ring's entire position history.

I remember reading this was a big problem with the ring chapter.

I'm not sure how it was solved in the original version, and I'm surprised it regressed

The market for games is just radically different than it was in 2008. Braid had very high production values and a reasonably low price tag at a time where "quirky indie 2D puzzle platformer with interesting aesthetic and a mystery" wasn't yet a cliche. An indie game that got some traction could be hugely profitable. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore, although that might change if the position of the big studios continues to erode.

Braid is from the long bygone era where indie games were few and far between, steam was a closed platform, and you had to smooch up to journalists, the clique, IGF judges, attend conventions and grind your way up to being noticed by the closed platforms of the time.

Now your just a dude like the rest of them. Puzzle games are not known for the replay value. And replaying a puzzle game when theres so many amazing spanking new and not so new unplayed games... nah

a predictable outcome really

Very accurate.

Braid is sort of an evergreen game that new people are going to continuously discover for decades, and periodic refreshes are probably a good idea, but I would not expect it to ever be a big seller again.

Honestly Braid 2 would probably sell fine (ignoring how impossible thematically that would be)

A new quirky indie 2D puzzle platformer with interesting aesthetic and a mystery from someone who did it once would be of high interest.

The problem is tons of his user base already played Braid and puzzle games aren't replayable.

Yeah. I can't help thinking that Braid 2 (maybe including a HD upgrade for Braid in the bundle) would have sold much better. Puzzle games are notoriously non-re-playable.

a similar thing happened to some flash games a couple years before that… I remember playing a tower defense game that the dev claimed was pulling in 6 figures a month with just a banner ad. People saw that and started making their own TD games.

Hard to really get a sense of tone from text quotes of a cynical game dev, but I got the feeling that he comes across as entitled to sales. For a remaster of a game from 2008. Sorry, but you cannot expect "a million" sales for a project like that... doesn't this guy have like 2 or 3 games "close to release" for like a year now? Maybe he'd do better to release one of those. I'm not sure you get to feel snobby about "dogshit sales" when you release 2 games in 16 years.

If you actually watch the video, he does not come across entitled to sales. He comes across as someone who is disappointed that his product didn't do better, and someone who is worried about his company like most small business owners.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Blow, but this clearly wasn't just a cash grab -- it sounds like a decent amount of time and money went into the remaster. I think it's fine for him to be personally upset that it didn't do better, especially because people's livelihoods are on the line. That's not the same as feeling entitled to sales.

Braid is a legendary indie game, it's not crazy to expect decent sales from an anniversary edition.

Couple reasons I can think of:

- Lack of marketing. The first time I'm hearing of a Braid remaster is from the creator bitching about its poor sales.

- Lack of replayability. Most people who played it the first time are probably satisfied with their playthrough and not convinces that they need to go through it again.

- Lack of value add. The game went on sale all the time on Steam, XBX, PSN, etc. I'm pretty sure I got the Steam version on a Humble Bundle for a few bucks, and I believe I had the PS3 or PS4 version as a free game on PS+ one month. Given that I could never muster the interest to finish the original game (which I can still happily play on Steam, mind you), I'm not sure why I'd want to buy the game again.

I think this was a miscalculation on the team's part that there would be sizable interest in a remaster. I mean I enjoyed World of Goo back in the day, too, but I don't feel like I need a remaster of that, either.

Then again, this is the guy that IIRC put all of his earnings from Braid directly into The Witness's development (essentially making it another make-or-break title even after Braid's success), so you get the feeling that however talented a developer he might be, maybe the guy needs someone above him to spot-check his financial decisions.

It was also delayed for over three years.

It's a legendary indie game in part because everybody played it. It was in the Humble Indie Bundle 2 in 2010, which means its market value approached "free copy in a Cracker Jack box" at that point. Braid 2 might have sold better.

Myst was legendary too, and sold very well. Let's be real, it wasn't actually that fun, but we had other reasons to enjoy it at the time (in my case, I was learning production rendering). It too would sell like "dogshit" today.

Funny you say that because there was a recent VR remake of Myst which got some decent reviews :-).

Myst wasn't that fun??

I know a lot of gamers, including my younger-than-Myst daughter, who very much feel the opposite.

"Fun" is subjective.

It’s famous but is not that unique compared to everything else that came out since. It doesn’t have a crazy dedicated community like Diablo, wing commander, doom, etc.

> it's not crazy to expect decent

Define "decent"

And yet it didn’t sale.

Jonathan made a comment a year or two ago that the studio needed cash to complete their new game and "there's a few obvious things we could do", or something along those lines.

My impression is that Braid: Anniversary Edition was one of those "obvious things" to do in order to generate revenue.

So creatively it feels like it didn't really need to exist, it seems more like it was mainly intended as a revenue raiser.

I think it would have been better to create a real sequel to Braid.

As everyone has said, attention and free time is limited these days. People who loved the original may have little interest in playing it again with minor changes, but might have bought a sequel.

I liked the original and bought it on day 1 (or at least week 1), but I have zero time to play a remaster...

This is the Steam page after skipping over what someone who played the original already knows

> A FRESH COAT OF PAINT This is the game you remember, with all the original challenges and the same haunting, evocative score — but repainted pixel by pixel so that each carefully rendered world comes to life in high resolution. New visual details, animated brushstroke effects and revamped sounds add to the immersive experience.

> GO (DEEP) BEHIND THE SCENES Explore the most extensive developer commentary ever put into a game, with over 15 hours of recorded insight and conversation from developer Jonathan Blow, artist David Hellman and more members of the "Braid" creative team. Navigate it by visiting a new in-game world, which also contains new puzzles and redesigns of classic puzzles.

It doesn't even list how many new puzzles and note that some of the puzzles are redesigns.

It doesn't include a new mechanic or anything just what I would assume are harder puzzles. (The original IMO got into grindy territory due to many rooms being slow to do and requiring resetting if you messed up the platforming at all)

Remakes that have replay value get people to have another go at a game that like and thus can do okay.

But puzzle games don't work like that as everyone who played the first is going to feel the core gameplay loop is a chore since the discovery aspect is dead.

Is Braid really a game that needed an anniversary edition?

Slay the Spire for example is cheap and bonkers fun for hundreds of hours, likewise many great small games I've enjoyed (FTL, Carrion, ...). I think as games go, Braid got enough money relative to its "actual fun-level" or something (obviously subjective).

And if they came out with an anniversary edition I’m not sure anyone would buy it either.

I suppose if it was easy and fast to swap out the old textures for the new ones?

Odd that Blow would assume giant sales for the game. It barely registered in my radar, plus it was a big hit on release. I wasn't really looking to buy it again. It's a puzzle game, I remember playing it for months back in the day, but I now know the solutions.

It wasn’t a simple texture swap. They added 40 new levels.

Ah I didn't know. I'm sorry for Blow. I really loved Braid when it came out.

> Odd that Blow would assume giant sales for the game.

Did they?

From the quotes in the article, it sure sounds like he was expecting this re-release to save his company.

> None, because we can't afford to pay anyone because the sales are bad.

That doesn't say they expected sales to be good.

It says they don't have money to pay someone to work on the orthogonal programming language thingy.

It's saying they don't have the money to pay anyone. Not that they have money to pay for game development but not other things. The bad sales of this game are stated to be the reason they can't afford to pay anyone.

If they didn't expect sales to be good, they sure wouldn't have expected to be able to pay salaries for a dozen SF-based devs with the proceeds. And if they didn't expect that, they couldn't blame the bad sales for not being able to pay staff.

As a naive reader (and now re-reader), I don't understand what this is other than more layers of hypothetical in service of inventing thoughts other people had. Maybe you have more lore than the article, ex. dozen SF-based devs? Happy to hear more.

Quote: "It's not like we sold a million copies day one or whatever, which is what you expect."

That is very misleading. He is specifically referring to NOT expecting to sell a million copies.

Right, thank you, they didn't expect to sell a million copies day 1 or whatever.

They?

Blow

Yea him.

"Did he?" is the proper way to say it given that he's a man.

Oh I thought it was a company lol, headline is cut off on mobile. https://imgur.com/a/PhFDyAC

Btw it's really amazing there's a volunteer anti-they pronoun police in the comments now. Thank you. Really good example of how you getting annoyed at something turns you into the something. It's pretty natural in English to use "they" in those contexts, policing it doesn't mean you're fixing some programming I got.

Sure! The original game was stellar and it holds up. There’s two whole generations of new gamers who have probably not played the original.

The original was authored at, I think, 720p. Totally reasonable to remaster at 4K and release for new audiences to enjoy.

Sadly it failed to reach that new audience. The games industry is beyond brutal and in dire straits right now.

I forget the exact issue but there was something about the PC version not having the feature of being able to remap controls on a gamepad, and one or two of the mapped buttons being very much not to my taste on my xbox360 controller, that made me give it up after a little while. If the anniversary edition adds control remapping I might revisit it.

Nah. Braid is overrated. Now that the Kotaku era is finally coming to a close the 2010s indie game scene vibe should be buried with it.

It is entirely different market nowadays. You really have to stand on your own feet and catch the attention of enough people... It is simply not enough to be lucky to be on store...

It doesn’t help that his game is bland and his personality is trash. The market is different in that consumers don’t have to put up with Blow.

Is braid really a game that needed...

> Braid: Anniversary Edition launched in May and adds 40 new levels, as well as over 15 hours of commentary.

... 15 hours of commentary?

To be fair I've only just heard of Braid but commentary is not something I look for in a puzzle game. Sounds awful, really

Blow has a reasonably large audience as a game dev thinkfluencer. I think he might have overestimated what % of a Twitch or YouTube audience is willing to go actually pay money for commentary from the same person.

On top of that the "40 new levels" seem to be "40 released development iterations of levels" instead of new content.

Ouch

40 new levels? That's pretty huge. I'd never even heard about this edition, and I'm someone who immensely enjoyed the original. A name like "Anniversary Edition" makes it sound like they made minor tweaks such as improved graphics or something. Shouldn't they have just named it Braid 2?

I mentioned this in a sibling conversation but I thought I'd mention it here too since I nearly bought the game until I read reviews: these don't seem to really be 40 "new" levels rather mostly "unreleased development versions" of existing levels or parts of the development commentary.

Apparently only 13 of them are actually new levels. 12 are alternative versions of existing levels and the rest are "commentary index levels".

It's like a DVD commentary track, it's for super fans.

Whatever you think of the merits of the game itself, historically, it's an important game and one of a few that came out around the same time that allowed games to be treated seriously as an art form by critics in the sense that the gameplay design itself was seen as an artistic expression rather than just the music or other art assets.

There's a lot to criticize about the game, but it's definitely a game that's worthy of a commentary track.

I guess I just don't get it. I loved Monty Python my whole life. Loved Terry Gilliam's performances. But when a friend got a Monty Python DVD with "features" the only "feature" of note was Terry Gilliam droning on and on, and on... and... on... yikes. It was just about the least funny thing I've ever seen. So disappointing.

A commentary is just behind the scenes if you want to know how it was made. If you don't care, it's boring.

Braid is a very good game and commentary from good game designers is extremely good.

I mean JB does seem to be someone who enjoys hearing himself speak but he is also an exceptional game designer so… yeah it’s good. It’s not just a texture swap.

It’s the kind of game you release a free HD update patch for and raise some excitement via gaming news sites, bumping sales of the original version.

> when asked how many of his development team are working on the compiler for programming language Jai, Blow replied: "None, because we can't afford to pay anyone because the sales are bad."

Context: jblow is a well known dev figure working on Jai, a programming language. He hasn't quite reached the fame level of carmack, but has a sizeable following

An indie studio building not only its own engine but its own language to make its own engine seems like a huge mistake.

Considering the money he made from Braid alone (let alone The Witness, which back then he claimed that it was about to surpass Braid's sales) - $4m mentioned at some point - i'd say the mistake would be his expenses.

$4m alone (again, let alone his other games) would be enough to retire and make languges, engines and whatever else he wanted.

For yourself, sure. To pay others to do it? Hardly. A two-pizza team in the US costs $1M to $2M a year fully loaded, depending on location.

US is huge, i'm 100% certain that he could move to a cheaper location if that was a concern.

And with the Internet there isn't really a reason to limit yourself to people from US, a fraction of that would be enough to contract people from EU (though i'm certain you can also find people from US with much less than $500k/year-$1m/year to work on games).

Probably should have focused on making games rather than creating an entirely new, proprietary language ecosystem.

That's certainly the pragmatic call, but while admittedly I'd never heard of Braid or his other games before he started showing up my YT feed, his takes on programming culture are very opinionated and compelling. He could have focused on making games and lobbing criticisms like so many of us do, but he chose to act. I'd say that's worth something.

I'm not sure where the weight behind his opinions comes from, though. Braid and The Witness are both well-respected games, but they're respected from a game design perspective, not as technical accomplishments. If you told me that both games were implemented using Unity or Unreal I would have no trouble believing that.

And although it's certainly quite an accomplishment for a single developer to complete even one successful game, it's not like he's remarkably prolific, either. If anything, it seems like Blow's technical purism has been an obstacle to his creative ambitions. I'm sure he'd argue that the two are inseparable, that the mindset that enabled him to create Braid is also the mindset that led him to work on Jai, and that might be true. But I'm not sure why anyone else should desire to follow in his footsteps -- I think most people would end up mired in the desire for purity without the achievement to balance it out.

I might contrast him with Edmund McMillen, who managed to use Flash to develop two hugely successful, influential, and creatively distinctive games in the span of a couple of years. His approach is just as worthy of respect as Blow's, I'd argue.

> I think most people would end up mired in the desire for purity without the achievement to balance it out.

I feel too many game devs get lost in that instead of just focusing on making a good game. Just make the damn game - there are so many good engines and languages out there, why do you want purity when you don't have the freedom to pursue it?

I think a lot of programmers love the idea of being game developers but don't really have much of an idea for what to make, so they get diverted into developing a game engine or even tools to support a game engine instead. People can spend years on that. And that's a perfectly fine hobby. But it doesn't usually result in actually making a game.

My advice to people going down that path is: consider contributing to ScummVM, an open source roguelike, or a ROM hacking project for a game you already like. Scratch your technical itch on something that other people will actually play. It feels great, and it gives you a better path toward eventually building something that's totally your own. Trying to build your own game engine and game on top of it is like taking a plane to Nepal and just starting to walk up Everest with the intention of figuring it out as you go.

Has anyone used Jai? What do you think? I used to watch a bit of his programming videos, but I'm definitely not a PL professional. I just think it's super cool to create one's own PL and dogfood it. I wish I could do that for PL and OS (am reading Showstoppers!).

I hear praise all the time from people in the private Beta, specially about its metaprogramming capabilities and how fast compilation can be.. Shame I haven't been able to test it yet.

Thanks! Sounds interesting. I'm glad he managed to do whatever he wanted to do.

I can appreciate the transparency of it, but talking about it in these terms can’t help sales. You are sort of doing the reverse of social proof on the purchase by saying people think it is dog shit.

From what I have read, most games have their biggest sales immediately after release. Winding down to basically nothing within a year (minus the unknowable viral popularity trigger). More eyes on him is unlikely to alter the financials.

If he didn't, then we wouldn't be reading about it. ;)

I suppose he figures it can't do much worse than it has been doing.

Considering this is the first I'm hearing of it, and I'm going to guess many other people, I'm not surprised. Did they do any marketing?

I’m surprised as well. I start my day off with a half hour of video game news everyday (Spawn Wave + other sources) and hadn’t heard a peep about this.

FWIW the linked article is reporting on a 5 minute YouTube video montage of Jonathan Blow interview snippets. Might be worth it to watch/listen to the video directly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KR5i98aCy0

Usually remasters make sense if some big value is added or the game is so old that new assets massively improve the experience. I don't believe Braid belongs to the latter, so the main value add to the game is developer commentary, which I have heard from multiple places, is phenomenal, but who really cares about developer commentary? I think it's almost exclusively other game developers, of which there are just not enough to generate massive sales.

Jonathan Blow is an amazing inspiration.

Braid, considered as one of the greatest games ever made, was built around a time when indie game dev wasn't really a big thing. He has also funded a bunch of other indie game dev companies.

His talks on programming and the bad practices of OOP, SOLID and all that nonsense and the general clunkiness and slowdown of software and the levels of abstraction and house of cards are very welcome commentary.

OT: But my favorite review of Braid is by Soulja Boy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSXofLK5hFQ

I never really enjoyed the stoic commentary in his games, meaning not why I played them. Once you play Braid you’ve played Braid. Why would I return for bug fixes and commentary? Why bet the stake of your company on a remaster that doesn’t really add anything to the game?

Adds "40 new levels" according to the article, which is basically how many the original game had.

That said, agree I don't really get what the thinking was here. Seems like he'd be better off just releasing the new levels and improved art, etc as a sequel rather then rather confusingly marketing it as an "Anniversary edition" of the original game.

Have not played it myself, but some Steam review pointed that 40 levels are in parts just iterations of existing levels. Could be interesting for someone wanting to see how those are developed, but average player, probably not...

I must have missed the new levels bit. I haven’t seen it advertised before now.

I didn’t see any game review websites cover the release or review it. Did they not market it enough?

Searching for: “braid anniversay” the top result is for braid-game.com which 500s when you visit the site on a VPN.

It’s a shame, because it has some of the most well-done commentary I’ve seen in a game. Worth a look if you’re into discussions about game design.

20€ for upgrade for game that has been sold for little as 1,5€ and often 3€... Also the modern day relevancy with the amount of options being around is questionable... This is not anymore the day when it was only one of the few kids on the block(Steam)...

On PC at least you can still run the original and aside from lower resolution art it holds up just fine.

I imagine the main reason to try a remaster is to get it on current gen console stores, but the indie game market is a lot more crowded than it was in 2008.

But it's a game you play for the puzzles and story, which don't give it the replayability of a more actiony platformer. Hard sell for people who played it already, so it has to find new customers. That's way harder than it was on the 360's Xbox Live Arcade.

Good. I wish this would be enough to stop pushing out remakes after remakes after remakes. I know that it won't be. But hopefully it's a small step towards it.

(I do have fond memories of the original, even though I totally forgot about it until I read this headline. But I also remember that it was a 2D scroller/puzzle game, which didn't have a lot of ways to improve in its field. At least not technically...)

I think I may be having a Mandela effect moment.

For me, Braid was most prominently known as like a cool HTML5 tech demo. I remember playing it at like 15fps in Google Chrome... And that's all it was.

But now I look at wiki, and apparently it was a video game for consoles and natively released for PC?

Am I misremembering something. Now when searching for the HTML5 version of Braid, I find no results.

Edit: Lol, I'm thinking of Bastion, very similar name and art style: https://boingboing.net/2011/12/09/html5-only-version-of-bast...

I think you are misremembering. I think Braid debuted on the Xbox Arcade or something like that. Maybe you are remembering something like Passage?

I am like 90% sure he's thinking of Passage.

Thanks for the help, actually it was Bastion.

https://supergiant-games.itch.io/bastion

The HTML5 demo I was thinking of: https://bastion.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:Soldierscuzzy/Bast...

Making a demo of a single level of a commercial game was a pretty common way of showing off what the HTML5 canvas could do, but I remember people basing it on stuff like Doom, where you're less likely to get sued by an angry game dev. I don't remember anything of the sort myself.

Bret Victor used some Braid sprites for one of his talks I believe, is it possibly this you're thinking of?

"Meat Boy", the Flash precursor to the indie hit "Super Meat Boy", was released less than 2 months after "Braid" so that could be it. "15 FPS" makes me think more along the lines of the Minecraft Java applet the following year or one of the early Unity web plugin demos maybe.

Braid is a classic fun title for sure, and it certainly follows the tradition of challenging game play.

1. Novelty:

2D side-scroller puzzles are a tough sell to the youth crowds these days, as many kids have the alternate choice of minecraft, Roblox (terrible), Fortnight, and GTA.

2. Utility:

Also, the demise of most puzzle games was the insipid walk-though content on YT. i.e. people look up spoilers for zero effort game play (not fun, so pointless.)

3. Perceived scarcity:

Have they considered relaunching the release, but changing "Braid: Anniversary Edition" title to "Braid: Uncensored bloody violent hadōken slaughter of the acid-barfing screaming dinosaurs".

Best of luck, =)

I literally had no idea this came out.

Steam Spy seems to agree. https://steamspy.com/app/499180

There’s so much competing for our attention these days

Cool. Blow could use a plate of humble pie.

He's asking $20 for an updated version of a 20-year-old indie game. I'd have happily paid $5 for a PS5 or Steam version but asking $20 feels nuts when you look at that is asked for other indie classics.

That and he has a reputation almost as bad as the Fez dude.

Tbh if I wanted to buy Braid again, I'd have just bought the original. I don't think HD graphics are really anything to the experience.

I wouldn't really buy this in the first place for $20, maybe on sale, but in addition you can get it for free on mobile if you have a netflix subscription, so I'd have to imagine that many people do what I did and played it for a bit on their phone, so now I doubt I'll ever pay for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com