Congratulations to the following creators:

Anastasia Kuznetsova - Raison
AWK - Harmon:i:c
Dario Zubović - QBCO
29Games - RocketPuzzle
Asriele Aestas - Our Sky
Cyathea Tree Team - Out of Bounds Exception
David Rhee - Sticky Blocks
Nico Saraintaris - Trash Diamonds
Weird Sisters Interactive - It's a Zoo.
Ruby - SokoBunny
Skalmantas Šimėnas - Magnecopter
Andrius Mitkus - Rimtis (working title)
Jose Hernandez - Efficient Necromancy

We are excited to see how these games progress and we're looking forward to sharing updates.

That was a work-in-progress, and I said at the time I'd post final specs as soon as we know them, which we now do.

We are definitely supporting HDR, on both the PS4 Pro and the base model PS4. If the game detects an HDR TV, it will start in HDR mode. HDR works in all resolutions mentioned below.

If you have a PS4 Pro, and are outputting to a 1080p TV, The Witness will render at 1080p, 60fps, 4x MSAA (which is substantially higher than the base PS4's 900p, 60fps, 2x MSAA). This is the same as we announced in the earlier posting.

If you have a PS4 Pro, and are outputting to a 4k TV, then you get a choice of two modes from the options menu:
(a) 1440p 2x MSAA rendering of the game world, upscaled to 4k, text and UI rendered at 4k, 60fps
(b) 4k 2x MSAA rendering for everything, 30fps 

We added option (b) because a lot of people seem to want it, and it does look really good!

I don't yet know the exact release date for the patch, but it is coming pretty soon, in November sometime. We are now in the process of nailing down all the little details and making sure they are good. As soon as we know the release date I will announce it here.

There is a wrinkle, which is that I can't be too precise about the sales results on specific platforms, because often when we sign a deal with a particular store, we agree not to reveal their sales numbers. I am actually not sure at this time which stores we are allowed to be specific about and which we aren't, and I would have to dig up and sort through a number of contracts to be sure about it; but that is not a good use of time right now, since I am spending most of my day supporting the users who have technical problems (shipping games on PCs these days is really not fun). The situation can be thorny in subtle ways, too, because if I post information about all stores but one, then I am implicitly revealing the sales figures for that last store, which is not allowed.

Finally, I want to make clear that we did not make this game in order to make money. We were trying to build a beautiful / interesting / intricate thing, first and foremost. The money just helps us stay in business in order to build new things. It is very easy on the Internet to read a financial posting like this cynically, so I urge folks out there not to do that.

Okay, so here's what I can say:

Across all platforms, The Witness has totalled over $5 million USD gross revenue in the first week, and it has sold substantially more than 100,000 units.

This is a good chunk more revenue in one week than Braid made in its entire first year, from August 2008-September 2009. (Braid initially launched on XBLA in August 2008, and it came to Steam in April 2009). Braid was considered a hit independent game at the time.

We can also compare sales by units instead of revenue; this is a little more of an apples-to-oranges comparison because The Witness has a higher price than Braid did (Braid launched at $14.99 [$16.50 when inflation-adjusted to 2015 dollars], and The Witness launched at $39.99). By number of units, the first week of each individual platform handily beats Braid's first week of sales. (Witness on PC by itself beat Braid's first week by a decent margin, and Witness on PSN by itself beat Braid's first week by a decent margin, counting only by number of units). This is great because as price goes up, naturally the number of units sold goes down. So the fact that we beat Braid by units, more than doubly, is a really nice success.

The Witness launched on two platforms, PSN and Windows PC. Neither of these platforms dominates our sales; PC is very strong for us, and PSN is very strong for us.

There are some publicly-available guesstimates for specific platforms on sites such as SteamSpy, but the numbers that SteamSpy is reporting for The Witness are a bit too low (though this is kind of to be expected, I guess, from the way that site works).

So, the game is doing great. That doesn't mean we have broken even on our development cost yet! 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.

As I mentioned, right now we are dealing mostly with PC graphics driver problems, and we are also working on adding some features to the game about configurable controls and rendering options, for PC and PS4.

After this, in the near future, we will start investigating the bringing the game to other platforms. Under serious consideration are: iOS, Android, Xbox One, OS X. We will provide more-concrete information about these as it becomes available!

It should go up on Steam this morning around 9 or 10am Pacific time.

I made a posting on the PlayStation Blog: https://t.co/ChsVlBzhVw

Music and Sound Effects

Once in a while I get a question, from someone who really liked the music in Braid, what the soundtrack in The Witness is like. The answer to this question is that there isn't one. There is (almost) no music in the game. This is not an arbitrary decision, but is in fact very important to the coherence of the thing we are making.

The Witness is a game about being perceptive: noticing subtleties in the puzzles you find, noticing details in the world around you. If we slather on a layer of music that is just arbitrarily playing, and not really coming from the world, then we're adding a layer of stuff that works against the game. It'd be like a layer of insulation that you have to hear through in order to be more present in the world.

Instead, we put a great deal of care into the sounds of the world around you, in a way that maximizes immersion in the game. This is made trickier by the game's setting: you are alone on this island, and there are not even any other animals. There are no birds in the trees! In everyday life if we imagine the sound of nature, we'll think of some elements that have no place on the island: a forest naturally has the sounds of birds, plains with smaller shrubbery will have crickets, a marsh will have the sounds of many insects. There's none of that in this game because in this game you are really alone, and it has forced us to be very creative with the audio in order to ensure things have depth and texture to them. This work is being done by Wabi Sabi Sound, who did the sound for the very atmospheric Dead Space series, and more recently some smaller, artier games like Ori and the Blind Forest.

We thought it would be fun to release a few more small videos to give you more of a feel of what the world of the game is like, so here's:

Story and Voicework

Lately I have been doing a lot of work on story and voice acting stuff. When wandering around the island, you may find voice recordings that were placed by ... well, at the outset of the game, you don't know who; and as the game goes along, there is an interesting mystery to unfold about who these people are or were. In the game currently we have what is known as "temp voice", which is me reading all the parts under very noisy conditions and just getting them into the game so we can make sure the data works properly with the engine, to get all the subtitles into the game and roughly synced with the audio (which we need to do sooner than later so we can give the translators those subtitles, which they will translate into many different languages).

We have cast the real actors and starting tomorrow we'll do our first test readings with those actors. We'll use this to get a new layer of temp voice in the game, which will get it closer to final; this will allow me to see how the game really feels with this stuff in there, possibly to adjust the nuances of the way the recordings appear in the game and the way they are played back. When everything feels good we'll do a set of final recording sessions. There's not a whole lot of time until release, and we have several holidays coming up, but we'll get it done!

We are working with Warner Brothers Game Audio in Burbank, California to do the voice stuff; they are providing the facilities and voice direction and production assistance. After we do a few recording sessions I will have more details to share in this department.

Localization

Earlier, I mentioned subtitles. As many games do, we will be localizing our game so that people who speak many different languages will be able to understand the words. We are not recording voice acting in different languages, mainly because it is pretty hard to make sure quality is high when you do that. It is hard enough making sure acting is good in just *one* language. We generally seem to feel the same way about movies: a foreign-language dub of a movie is generally considered to be inferior to a subtitled version, because the acting is so important.

Our localization efforts will involve menu text and subtitles, just as for a good movie.

This is not 100% final, but here's the list of languages we are planning to have translations for, at launch:

• English
• Italian
• French
• German
• Spanish (Spain)
• Spanish (Latin America)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Arabic
• Russian
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Japanese
• Korean
• Polish
• Indonesian

We may add more languages later but man this stuff is expensive, so there is a limit to how many languages we can do at once.

We will have more news for you before too long!

Here's my update on the PlayStation Blog.

Also, we have some interviews and previews of the game:

Gamespot
Ars Technica
Polygon
Wired
PlayStation Blog

The PlayStation Blogcast had a nice ten-minute discussion of the game.

Our deal with Sony is a limited-time exclusivity that applies to competing console platforms. Basically it is that you will see the game on the PlayStation 4 for a while before you will see it on the Wii U or the rumored next Microsoft console. (We haven't been disclosed on Microsoft's next console, so I don't know anything about that platform besides the rumors that are on the internet).

This exclusivity does not prevent us from being on the PC or iOS at launch, for example.

People have been speculating that we got paid for PS4 exclusivity, but that is not the case. There was no money involved.

The real situation is that, because we are a small developer, we only have the ability to launch on a small number of platforms at once. We liked the idea of being on a console, and originally we thought we might be on the PS3 or Xbox 360, but eventually we decided not to target either of those, due to the relatively low system specs and the work required to do the ports. After some more time went by, and our release date drifted further into the future, we realized that the next-generation console launch time might be a good time to release the game. (For a while we were hoping to be out substantially earlier than the next consoles, e.g. right now, so we didn't start thinking seriously about this until recently).

To launch a high-spec version of the game on a console, it came down to a choice between the next Microsoft console or the next Sony console. There were people at Sony who really liked the game and were keeping in touch with us about it, and so we naturally started going to their PS4 developer events, got a dev kit, and started playing with it. I don't have good communication with anyone at Microsoft right now, but all our technical people like the PS4 specs a lot more than the leaked Durango specs, and we like the positioning of the PS4 (it's about games) more than what we perceive Microsoft's positioning is going to be.

So we just found ourselves doing a PS4 port. And once we are doing that, it is not practical for us also to think about another console port. We were going to be a de facto console exclusive for Sony no matter what. As I mentioned, there are people at Sony who are very interested in The Witness, so they somehow percolated up through the ranks the idea of showing the game in the launch show.

Of course, Sony wants that show to point out things that are going to be exclusive or special to their console. If we are in their show, but next week we turn around and announce "we changed our mind, we are exclusive on Durango forever," that would be a bit weird. So to be in the show we signed a timed exclusivity for competing consoles. But this was just a formalization of something that was already going to be the case. We like the PS4 and we like the people at Sony we are working with, so it was an easy choice to make the agreement.

Exact timing of our release on launch platforms has yet to be figured out. It just depends on how much we can do and when; we'll know more as we get much closer to the game being done.

(Watch it in HD + fullscreen if you have the bandwidth!)

Our gift to you, on this very special Valentine's Day, is the worldwide release of the long-awaited game Dear Esther.

If you haven't heard of Dear Esther, watch this:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

(Or hey, watch the trailer even if you are quite familiar with the game; the trailer is beautiful and worthy of multiple viewings.)

We expect public reception of this game to run wide: some will love it, and others will be very concerned about whether this thing can be called a game and what that means. So far, this has certainly been the case in pre-release reviews.

Game Informer scored the game an 8/10, saying: "You should consider checking out Dear Esther the same way you’d appraise a film. If you’re interested in absorbing an intellectual story and gorgeous visuals without having to exert a drop of effort, take a chance on this curious experiment."

VideoGamer.com scored the game a 9: "Discovery is such an important part of Dear Esther, especially when everything is so phenomenally pretty."

Meanwhile, Destructoid gave the game a lowly 4.5/10: "It’s as if it wants to be a part of this wonderful medium of ours without asking itself why, which is exactly why you should seek it out and learn from its failures as a game enthusiast, critic, or developer."

We like that there's such a big difference of opinion because it means the game is breaking new ground. It's playing in territory that is not safe; there is no established understanding there.

Dear Esther is a game that no publisher would have funded. Dan, Rob, Jessica and the other associates of thechineseroom have done an excellent job putting together a beautiful game. We are happy to be backing it; we hope you enjoy playing it.

If you'd like more information about Dear Esther, here's an interview with Dan, and here's a link the game's page on Steam.

Update: Dear Esther has been wildly successful, selling 16,000 copies in under 24 hours. As an investment, it reached profitability in 5.5 hours. More details are available at a new post on the Indie Fund blog.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Q.U.B.E. will be available on Steam.

(Web site for the game)

(Indie Fund announcement page)

We at Thekla, Inc. are a small independent developer making games with tradition-breaking designs.  We are pushing the boundaries of what a video game can be. Our current project is The Witness, a puzzle/exploration game designed by Jonathan Blow, designer/programmer of the critically-acclaimed Braid.  Our office is in Berkeley, California, USA but we will consider remote work for the right candidates.

Senior Game Programmer (full-time)

Work with other excellent programmers to build technically-sophisticated games for a variety of platforms, including consoles, PCs, and tablets.  Work on systems-level infrastructure as well as gameplay code.  You get a lot of freedom to approach problems the way you want to, and to employ your full range of technical creativity.  Management overhead is minimal.  There are many perks you won't find in other jobs.

Our code is mainly in C++.  When it comes to building software, we have a no-nonsense approach.

Job Requirements:

• Be good at making video games.

Senior Game Programmer (part-time, contract)

Like the job above, but part-time.

To inquire about any of these jobs, please send email to jon@number-none.com.

Earlier this year, some friends and I, all successful independent game developers, put together the Indie Fund in order to help support newer folks with good ideas.  All the hoops involved in setting up such an organization have been passed through, and we are now open for general submissions.  If you are an independent developer who needs money for a project-in-progress, go check out the Apply page to see what kinds of games we are looking for.

Thanks, and good luck!

Today we are announcing a fund that provides very good terms for talented indie developers working on high-quality games.  Our terms are much friendlier than what publishers offer.  Our goal is to help indies become stronger while retaining their independence.

The past couple of years have been good for independent game developers.  Through download services like Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, WiiWare, and Steam, independent developers have found a very large audience.  Some of us have been lucky enough to develop hit indie games that were very financially successful.

Braid was one of those games.  The success of Braid has allowed me to undertake more-ambitious projects like The Witness.  At the same time, I felt that I wanted to do something with the profits that would help other indies with their own games.  More recently, while talking to publishers about The Witness, I felt that the business climate around publishing and funding these smaller games had not caught up with reality: it's a model where the standard terms are tuned for budgets in the tens of millions of dollars.  Because publishers want to stick to this model even for low-budget games, it was very hard for indie developers to get a fair deal.

It turns out that other successful indies felt the same way, so we have pooled our resources and launched this fund.  We will be announcing further details soon.  At the GDC, Ron Carmel will be giving a talk about the problems that exist in the current publishing model for indie-budget games.

We've had the timing of this announcement planned for a while, but it seems like some kind of strange synchronicity that we're revealing our existence just as all this trouble is happening at Infinity Ward.  When you're a mainstream developer, and you've made one of the most successful and profitable games of all time, and then just a few months later your publisher and parent company is willing to so bald-facedly mutilate your company, well, what conclusions can be drawn from that?  If publishers of that size are so megalomaniacal as to be incapable of seeing the importance of a developer's talent -- instead believing that the game's success is somehow due primarily to their brilliant marketing strategy or their CEO's charming personality -- then how will this ever change?

If Infinity Ward can't be treated with respect, then who can?

Independent developers can.  That's one answer, at least.  Indie Fund is here to help make that independent existence a reality for as many talented developers as we can.

Here's a link to the main Indie Fund site, with an email you can use to contact us.

At the moment of writing this post, The Witness has no Twitter followers and no Facebook fans, so you could be the first!

Many people have been asking for more details about the game, so I thought it might be nice to kick things off with some concept art... in the next post.

Welcome, and thanks for your time and attention!

-Jonathan.