The Developer Wrote a Post-Mortem Post About His Recently Released Indie Game
Johnnemann Nordhagen, the lead developer on the narrative-focused adventure game Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, released a lengthy post-mortem post about his game on Friday. Nordhagen went over the successes and failures of his game and, while the game was received fairly well, he described it as a “disaster” commercially.
Nordhagen was previously the lead programmer on 2013’s Gone Home, a first-person adventure game.
“I can’t discuss exact numbers, but in the first few weeks fewer people bought the game than I have Twitter followers, and I don’t have a lot of Twitter followers (and this tells you a lot about how effective marketing via Twitter is),” explained Nordhagen.
“So far, I have made $0 from the game. That may look like a high number, but consider that it took four years to make — that works out to approximately $0/year,” he added.
Nordhagen guessed that he made about zero dollars per hour during the development of the game. He also said that the game cost about $140,000 to make due to all the contractors and collaborators he had to pay.
“Joking aside — that’s dismal,” Nordhagen wrote. “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.”
Nordhagen went onto to say that his game’s lack of sales “should be worrying” for anyone involved indie gaming industry. “Basically, I’m not sure that games like this one can continue to be made in the current market,” Nordhagen wrote.
We reviewed Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and gave it a score of 87 out of 100. “If you’re looking for a great narrative with an air of mystery, this is certainly the game for you,” our reviewer, Thi Chao, wrote.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is currently available on the PC, Mac and Linux.