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The Witness sold "substantially" over 100,000 units in its first week

The Witness has been out for one week and has brought in over $5 million in gross revenues.

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After one week on sale, The Witness has sold "substantially" more than 100,000 units, Jonathan Blow has revealed.

Blow could not provide precise numbers due to NDAs with distribution platforms, but in a blog post did say sales on PC and PS4 are both strong, with neither platform dominating the other.

As Blow predicted, The Witness has exceeded Braid's performance. In terms of unit sales, both PC and PS4 managed more unit sales individually than Braid's first week sales; in other words, The Witness more than doubled Braid's first week sales.

Revenue-wise the comparison is less meaningful, as The Witness ($40) is more expensive than Braid was at launch ($15), but at $5 million gross, The Witness made "a good chunk more" in one week than Braid's entire first year.

"The game is doing great. That doesn’t mean we have broken even on our development cost yet," Blow said; remember how he spent all his Braid money and then some on this project?

"Because our development budget was so high, $5 million in revenue is not enough to recover it yet (because we split that revenue with the storefronts, we have to subtract VAT in Europe, etc).

"However, it is looking like, as time goes on, we should break even and make a comfortable safety margin on top of that, which will allow us to make more nice games in the future — unless some kind of world economic disaster happens."

For now, Thekla Inc is looking into fixing PC driver problems, and adding more control and rendering options to both platforms. Looking further ahead, the team is investigating ports for Android, iOS, Mac and Xbox One.

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The Witness

iOS, PS4, Xbox One, PS3, PC

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Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

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Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.
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