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Witness sells over 100,000 copies in first week

Creator Blow reveals gross revenues of over $5 million

A week after the release of puzzle game The Witness developer Jonathan Blow has revealed that the game has already raked in more than $5 million in gross revenue and has sold "substantially more" than 100,000 units.

In his blog post Blow also compared the sales success with that of his other big hit, Braid:

"This is a good chunk more revenue in one week than Braid made in its entire first year, from August 2008-September 2009. (Braid initially launched on XBLA in August 2008, and it came to Steam in April 2009). Braid was considered a hit independent game at the time," he wrote.

"We can also compare sales by units instead of revenue; this is a little more of an apples-to-oranges comparison because The Witness has a higher price than Braid did (Braid launched at $14.99 [$16.50 when inflation-adjusted to 2015 dollars], and The Witness launched at $39.99).

"By number of units, the first week of each individual platform handily beats Braid's first week of sales. (Witness on PC by itself beat Braid's first week by a decent margin, and Witness on PSN by itself beat Braid's first week by a decent margin, counting only by number of units). This is great because as price goes up, naturally the number of units sold goes down. So the fact that we beat Braid by units, more than doubly, is a really nice success."

Blow also revealed that when it came to the PC and PSN versions of The Witness, neither format dominated sales and that the revenue, while impressive, did not put the game into profit just yet, but that projections suggested it would "break even and make a comfortable safety margin on top of that."

He added that the team were considering iOS, Android, Xbox One and OS X version of the game in the future.

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Rachel Weber avatar
Rachel Weber has been with GamesIndustry since 2011 and specialises in news-writing and investigative journalism. She has more than five years of consumer experience, having previously worked for Future Publishing in the UK.
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