XBLA darling Braid lands on PC March 31st [update]

Man, what a huge mistake. The people who weren't going to buy it on 360 for $15 sure as hell aren't going to buy it on PC for $20...but they ARE sure as hell going to pirate it for free.

And are the non-360, PC owners really that interested in paying $20 for a six hour game?

want to play it. But i'm not paying that price.

Not gonna pirate it though, guess i'll just have to wait until it drops to a realistic price.

I do think they'd have made a lot more cash if they released it at a fair price though...

Yeah in all honestly, I'm not sure what the big hype was about this game. it seems just about every indie artsy downloadable game is vastly overrated. Happened to Pixeljunk Eden, Braid, and looks like Flower (although to be fair I haven't played it, but gameplay looks basically like a fly through rings game)

And before you say I'm a FPS whore or something, I love artsy games as long as they have good gameplay to go with it. Killer 7 is a great example, Valkyria Chronicles, Pixeljunk Monsters.

I don't know if I can play this game, not because of its price point but I will forever be haunted of Soulja boy antics for playing this game...

Curse you joystiq for ever posting that vid!!!!

"The Space Giraffe problem" was not that it was priced too cheaply... it was just that it was a terrible game. I contributed to those 19k sales (and felt like an idiot later once I realized that I got not an ounce of enjoyment out of the game) but wouldn't have wasted any money on it if it had been priced any higher.

I am fine with the price it is set at on the XBLA. I personally think $15 is a little much for a downloadable game, but w/e.
Its not that its $20...

Its, WHY is it $20?
Do they think that people paying $50/yr deserve a cheaper game?
When someone who just bought a $800-$6000 computer with access to better and cheaper games needs to pay more?
If anyone can give me a good reason WHY PC owners need to pay more for a half-arsed port, I may purchase it. Until then, it is a "rental" for me.

Bummer, I enjoyed this game on my friends Xbox... Sale lost.

$20 is pretty standard for an indie game on the PC. Crayon Physics, World of Goo, Aquaria, Depths of Peril, Noitu Love 2, and Alien Shooter 2 are all $20 on the PC. They have to be rather diminutive to go for $10 (Titan Attacks), or very substantial to go for $30 (Mount and Blade).

One of the problems with these indie folks is that they really have no concept of market economics. The same thing happened with the Penny Arcade dudes. They honestly think that their hard work or how "fun" the game is compared to some other games they've played is relevant when they set the price.

Problem is, a game's "value" doesn't come from how hard you worked on it. It doesn't even have much to do with how fun it is to play, or how it compares to Portal or Frogger. A game's value, like everything else, comes from one thing: how much someone else is willing to pay for it.

If you charge too much, or too little, you end up making less money than you would otherwise. It sucks, but that's the way it works, and it can't be changed by negotiation, manifestos, or complaints about how much people spend on Madden.

Ah Braid... One of my favorite XBLA titles (when I still owned my 360). I never got all the stars and would love to go through it again.

So... here is that obligatory post... please release this on PSN.

Er, um, Ben? I'm not sure you're familiar with PC gaming, but most PC games of this ilk are $19.99 and reduced by half when they hit XBLA. See: Switchball, for example. $20 on PC, $10 on XBLA.

Peggle, Bejeweled 2, etc. All are $20.

Braid is incredibly overrated imo.

$20, for a game like this is ridiculous. $20 can buy you so much more than a short platformer.

Lets look at steam for example

Team Fortress 2 =$20
Unreal Tournament 3 = $20 (I got it for $10 through steam)
Half-Life 2 =$20
Mass Effect = $20
Bioshock = $20
Company of Hero's = $20
Various Prince of Persia games are $10 each
Beyond Good and Evil is $10, which I highly recommend if you've never played it

I could continue, but I hope I've proven my point. $20 is a complete rip off for Braid (I thought that $15 was too much as well).

Um, let's see, 'cause he's a greedy, arrogant, overblown (pun intended) whore? Yeah, that probably about covers it. This game is more full of itself than just about anything I've ever seen. You know (or maybe you don't) those french art house films that take themselves WAY too seriously? Yeah, that's about it. That aside, the "game" itself was nothing special. At all. I still have no clue why anyone goes ga ga over this, unless they are are pretentious as Blow.

Agree with other people here. Blow is full of himself, and has money/time managing problems if that game really took so long to break-even. Buy it if the demo/full game really impressed you. Don't buy it to support that cool artsy guy who has to make a bit more than break-even.

Also, never buy any games to support the developer. Buy games because you like the game. (I mean you aren't buying the new hannah montana game to support the dev so why would you with braid of you don't quite like it). And don't like or buy a game because it has critical acclaim, think for yourself.

peace,

If this game came out 10-15 years ago we'd be paying $30-40 (think Out of this World) for it and no one would be bitching.

But hey, it only lasts you like, 4 or 5 hours if you don't get the stars, and it's an ungodly $15-20 (never mind being able to get discounts on XBL prepaid cards). Jonathan Blow hates your wallet and your stupid brain. Sure, $15 could get you a movie ticket and a soda, and that would last you a whole 90ish minutes, and you don't even get to keep it afterward (but you do get to spend the same amount of money on a DVD or twice as much on a Blu Ray that you can keep and watch at your leisure, something you probably wouldn't have done if you didn't watch the movie in the first place, so you essentially paid a premium price for a commercial with bad seating and an audience that won't shut their whore mouths. Or you could buy 4 monthly issues of a comic book that would last you about an hour before you return them to their slip covers, or one of those premium looking books that sit pretty on a shelf and last a good 4 hours. Or you could buy 15 songs on iTunes and be done listening to them in about an hour and then needlessly listen to them again, even though like Braid, you already know how the whole thing works out. Or you could get 7 episodes of some half hour show off of iTunes and be finished with them in under 3 hours.

Psh, why even buy games when I can just play flash games for free online? Still not convinced to give up buying games entirely? Let's just subscribe to GameTap and get infinity playtime for a month. Still sounding a little too removed to be a fair comparison? Why not buy the $30 Sonic Sega Collection, and then we can get, I don't know, 200 hours of entertainment? Why put down $20 on Mass Effect, when I get just as many hours out of Phantasy Star IV (more if you skip the BS planet exploration, in ME not PS4) and it costs a fraction of a dollar? How can anyone defend games that aren't on the Sonic Sega Collection by using this price to hours of entertainment measuring stick that everyone seems to have a boner over? Hell, I spent $10 on a clearance copy of Final Fantasy Tactics that I played for over 100 hours, and then turned around and sold online back in 2000 before anyone even knew that game was getting reprinted back for almost $100, so it's like I got paid 90 cents an hour to play that game. How come Jonathan Blow won't put down his pretentious books written by Europeans and pay me $5 to play Braid for 5ish hours when Square and that guy on eBay essentially have?

Oh wait, is that because each game, no, any possible artwork in any medium (film, literature, television, music, etc.) is a completely unique experience in which price has no bearing on the amount of enjoyment one gets from the product? Sure, why not?

But hey, being an indy developer is easy and I'm sure he made this game in his sleep and doesn't even deserve half the money he made from this game. I mean, why would he even bother when it doesn't even have multiplayer which means we totally would just rent it, beat it, or buy it then sell it used the next day. Or at least we would if it wasn't a damn DLable game. Jonathan Blow hates my freedom to exploit a morally confusing system.

And yes, I'm baffled by the $5 increase in price, but we almost gave Capcom a free pass with Bionic Commando. Maybe we're getting an SDK or some shit? Everyone chill out. :-)

I guess I'm just not going to buy it then.

I'll just echos some of the comments here, but there's absolutely no reason that I should pay more for the same game on PC. I was interested in this game back when it topped the Innovation in Game Design category at the Independent Games Festival, way before Microsoft snatched it for the XBLA, so I can wait a few more months.

I cant believe how tight you moaners are, complaining about paying a fair amount for a game which actually has substance- even if it is small- while quite probably donating the same/month to some thoughtless MMO, lapping up endless sequels, and big name hash em ups.

Fair enough if you've played the demo and dont like the game, but if its a case of not paying that much on principal then ffs, have a heart, support the industry.

Won't be buying it until a) it's $10 or less, and b) it's on steam.

Finally got around to playing and buying this about two weeks ago. It's a great game, the hype was fully deserved. The $15 was definitely worth it. I'd pay $20 for it if I was a PC gamer.

$20?

No.

Didn't the guy that make the iShoot game already net 600k and counting? That game sells for like $3. Sorry, I love Braid, and I know Joystiq loves Jonathan Blow, but the dude seriously just seems like a cock. Increasing the price to $20 is a dick move.

Supporting or not, the game will end in the torrents...

That's it...