I finished up Braid yesterday. It’s a good game and definitely worth the $15. Some of the puzzles are positively ingenious. It’s the first puzzle game I’ve played since Gobliins 2 (oldschool!) that felt like a co-op game. Bringing someone else in to look at a puzzle for a change in perspective can make all the difference, then you build off each other’s ideas to finally reach that “ah hah” moment when you crack it.

Still, there’s one thing that I’m wondering about, and it isn’t related to any of the puzzles.

Braid has been selling great. It’s up to around thirty thousand sales, but it hasn’t turned a profit yet. The reason is, Jonathan Blow dropped $180,000 of his own money on the project.

The cost doesn’t surprise me. Hiring an artist of this caliber can’t be cheap, for instance.

The thing I keep getting stuck on this old quote from December.

Making money is hard sometimes, and if you convince yourself that you need to make money (in order to eat, or fund the next game, or whatever), then you are automatically on a slippery slope and will start justifying all sorts of things, and eventually you are far from your original ideals but that doesn’t seem too bad because you “just had to be realistic”.

Well, fuck that. I’ve seen a lot of developers go that way, and none of them are now in situations that I would be happy in.

Speaking as someone who does in fact have to eat, I’m trying to figure out just what’s being said here. (The original context for the quote has since been lost.)

The loss of an investment of $180,000 would wreck my life pretty hard. How are game makers suppposed to buy groceries in an ideal world? How does he? What’s his situation?

I will ask.

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