Braid: tearing up Metacritic; one of the top XBLA launches
Jonathan Blow's Braid is drowning in critical acclaim, just now hitting an average of 93 on Metacritic and becoming the 8th highest-rated Xbox 360 game on the console. The official Braid Blog takes the opportunity to point out that indie developers don't need to make cheap PopCap clones to be successful; if they do something different, their work can be recognized. Yeah? Well, this industry is all about sales so ... how's the game selling on XBLA?
Blow cites VGChartz's ballpark figure of 28.5k copies sold and estimates that the number "seems to be in the right neighborhood" as of last Saturday. Does that mean his struggle with the game's pricing has paid off in a big way? Apparently not. Blow contends that Braid will need to sell a lot more to be profitable but "things are looking promising now." We'll say! Let's put that estimate up against the top XBLA launch figures in a thoroughly unscientific breakdown*:
Braid, ~28.5k units
Rez HD, 25k units
Ikaruga, 22.5k units
Penny Arcade Adventures Episode 1, 16.5k units
N+, 13k units
*(Figures represent sales gathered from the first three days of availability. Blow's ballpark figure was posted on Saturday, three days after Braid's Wednesday launch).
