IGN talked about the impact that Braid had on the industry of indie games. Great little look into the history of the amazing game and the man behind it.
The most interesting thing about this project is the choice of timing and the platform. Initially, Blow wanted to launch the game on Steam, but Valve was reluctant to support the game and was not really sure about the success of the project. They made a very small forecast of 5k copies. However, Blow found another way out. He worked with Microsoft to launch Braid on Microsoft Live Arcade. The initial sales of the project were significantly more – over 50k copies (and it got more).
Blow actually invested a huge amount of money in the game and was literally broke before the launch. If he failed, probably it would be his last independent game. It’s great to see that the whole thing has worked out.
Author: Kirill Tokarev