GDC: Braid cost 200k to make, says Blow Comments by Ellie Gibson

"It's hard to sell a turd,"

not if its on the wii call it Turd Sports or Turd Fit and you got yourself a winner

somehow wee turd sports just sounds a bit...wrong

Insightful stuff there. Sehr interessant as they say all over Europe.

"Any publisher who takes a gatekeeper role doesn't necessarily understand what makes a good or bad game in the first place," he said. "What they greenlight or turn down isn't necessarily in their best interests, even though they think it might be"

Well that is certainly true.

Sehr interessant as they say all over Europe.

They don't say this at all.

:D

Sehr interessant as they say all over Europe

er...trente percente?

Dayamn, well if EVERYONE learnt to draw us artists would be out of a job.

You can't learn talent, Blow.

LOL, forgive me, that's about $66k a year, but how much time did the artist spend on it, and how much was spent on the artist? I'd imagine they were freelance too... doesn't really add up to much, I guess, but it's still comfortable living.

"Towards the end of the cycle, Microsoft started focus testing Braid - and "it was terrible", said Blow. "The scores were terrible. And then you could feel the interest in this game at Microsoft evaporating rapidly. They stopped answering my emails quite so quickly.""

He goes on to criticise the focus testing mentallity but he could at least have given some info on how exactly he turned it around from being 'terrible' to being very highly regarded at release. Microsoft would not have been pushing as part of their summer promotion with the likes of Galaga 2 and Geometry Wars 2 and Castle Crashers if the focus testing was still saying it was rubbish.

@steviepunk- I think he meant the experience of putting something that isn't a space marine/army shooter through the xBox 360 focus testing wringer was terrible, not the game itself.

You can easily sell a turd, how else would Need for Speed sell so much every year?

Enough Blow already. He's horribly over-exposed! Hear me out. Why should I care what he thinks? Sure, he made a wonderfully designed set of game mechanics in Braid and had some glorious level design, but it was also pretentiously (and in my humble opinion, badly) written, expensive and ridiculously far up its own arse. Can we not have more articles covering the wisdom of developers who are actually qualified to give an opinion on this stuff, rather than a one-hit-wonder with no track record? Boring!

I'd of bought it but it was overpriced & now ive lost interest. should of been 800pts.

Can this cunt and his dull, pretentious, overpriced game please just fuck off somewhere and not come back until he's got something NEW and INTERESTING to show us? Going on and on about how hard it was being a developer (oh yeah, admitting you lived a luxurious life only doing four hours work a day building a game - yeah, we really feel for you, you lazy bastard. I'm sure many modders do more work, for longer, for free) and how much it cost and so on and so on.

How about you tell us how after all his griping about how EVIL MICROSOFT FORCED HIM to charge so much... he then decided that he'd made so much profit off the XBLA version that he immediately cut the price of the PC version on release?

PLEASE, games media, STOP GIVING HIM A SOAPBOX TO TALK BOLLOCKS ON.

(and yes, the irony of 'it's hard to sell a turd' when he did, ha ha haaaa I see what you did there)

@beemoh - He said "The scores were terrible", so I'd assume that he is referring to the focus testing feedback scores.

Though I'm sure the process of XBLA focus testing was terrible as well, but I suspect that Blow just likes to whine about things a bit, so if he did get good feed back that changed the game from 'terrible' to great (at least in terms of giving MS confidence to promote the game), then the XBLA obviously can't be quite as bad as he makes out.