In a new blog post, Dim Bulb Games’ lead developer Johnnemann Nordhagen has been a complete flop since its release in February. While Nordhagen wouldn’t say exactly how many units were sold, he did say that “in the first few weeks fewer people bought the game than I have Twitter followers.” This worked out to less than 5,000 copies being sold.
Nordhagen even revealed that he spent over $140,000 to pay collaborators and contractors for their work, but he himself has not received a dime. He also went on to say…
“Joking aside — that’s dismal. And terrifying. At the end of the day it’s astounding that a game that got this much attention from the press, that won awards, that had an all-star cast of writers and performers, that had a bizarre celebrity guest appearance(!) failed this hard. It scares me.”
“That last part should be worrying for anyone in the indie games industry. [Where The Water Tastes Like Wine could have been a non-commercial game, but it would have had to be very different. It would be far less polished, it wouldn’t have had the collaborators that it did, I could not have paid people who couldn’t afford to work for revenue share or for the love of the game (thus, I fear, cutting out some of the most valuable voices that this game was a platform for). I could have developed it as a side project, but it took me four years as is. Basically, I’m not sure that games like this one can continue to be made in the current market.”
Where the Water Tastes Like Win is available for PC, Mac, and Linux.
