In today’s issue of Counting Rupees, Jeff Engel talked about why the sales figures for Braid are a bad sign for the casual game industry.

His arguement is essentially that when you do the math, Braid has sold 55k copies (according to public estimates) at 15 bucks each, which translates into $825,000.  You have to multiply this by 70% to get the developers cut, and then do a bunch of math to account for localization fees, certification, and development costs.

Jeff Engel makes the claim that in order for Braid to achieve its goal of completely financing the next game Blow wants to make, the magic number of sales Braid would have to achieve is something like 100k copies.  Jeff’s concern is that many games don’t sell those kinds of numbers.

My response to this would be that I have absolutely no doubt that Braid will hit and exceed 100k copies, that’s virtually a certainty.  Digitally distributed games certainly don’t have the market penetration that sales at brick and mortar stores do, but by the same token, the costs are significantly less.  XBLA arcade sales should follow a long tail distribution - meaning that after only two weeks of sales, the majority of the income from Braid is yet to be seen.

While it might be true that many games don’t reach 100k in sales, that’s true when you sell your shovelware game at Gamestop too, and at least there you’re not giving a cut to the retailer, another cut to bribe the retailer into showing your title promenantly for three days, another cut for manufacturing and distribution, and an even bigger cut to the publisher.