MULTI Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

Description

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is an upcoming game about traveling, sharing stories, and surviving manifest destiny. Featuring gorgeous illustration by Kellan Jett, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine combines 2D visuals with a 3D overworld US map. Players wander through the United States – and through a century of history – to meet a variety of people, each with their own stories to tell.

History

Dim Bulb Games was founded by Johnnemann Nordhagen, co-founder of Fullbright and sole programmer on Gone Home. WTWTLW, a game inspired by the folk tales and folk music of America, is the first project by the studio.

Features

• A variety of folk tales and personal stories to encounter, told by characters from all over America
• Beautiful combination of 3D overworld and 2D illustration in its own unique style
• Stories by a wide selection of excellent writers
• An emerging fantastical, psychedelic, surreal, and creepy tinge as the game continues

Read more at http://gematsu.com/2015/12/gone-hom...re-water-tastes-like-wine#bz5BE86HFT8KgIZc.99

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On a critical level, the game has not performed as well as I had hoped or expected. Coming off of all the attention, and especially the awards, I had assumed that if it failed to find an audience, it would at least be recognized by the press as something exciting. However, I forgot that festivals and awards bodies, as well as preview coverage, focus heavily on the ideas and promise of a game and maybe consider only the first few hours of play. Reviews look at the whole experience, and many places found that lacking. The game currently has a score of 75 on Metacritic. Some folks loved the game, others found it mediocre, often because of the pacing issues I mentioned above. A 75 isn’t terrible but it’s not what I wanted, obviously, nor do I feel like that number represents the actual quality of the game.

Luckily, our Steam user reviews and even Metacritic user reviews are better — we’re currently rated “Very Positive” on Steam. I think the difference between official scores and user reviews are a result of two things: one is that user reviews are from a self-selecting niche of people who are Into This Sort Of Thing, and the other is that users have the time to play the game at its own pace, which will minimize many of the problems reviewers faced.

Commercially, it’s a disaster. 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).

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. Compared to the $120,000+/year salary of a 15-year veteran in a AAA studio, it begins to look a lot smaller! And then if I go into the hourly breakdown… I don’t have an actual count of hours spent making the game, but there was a lot of crunch that went into it, so I am guesstimating I made about $0/hour. That’s not a lot! And then once you factor in the ~$140,000 I spent paying my contractors and collaborators for the game, you begin to see that maybe it wasn’t, financially speaking, worth it. I guess I will have to wait a bit longer to buy that Juicero.

Joking aside — that’s dismal. 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.

I am going to be OK, at least for the moment. I don’t own a house, so I didn’t mortgage it to ship this game (being a millennial pays off!). I’m only responsible for myself, and I didn’t spend the last of my savings, plus I have marketable skills that I can hopefully use to keep myself fed in the future. I’m glad that I got to pay so many talented people for their skills, and that there were only a few folks getting paid through revenue share (there were a few, and I feel terrible about that). I am also very glad that many of the people who worked on this game are already using that fact and their experience to find other work with teams — if everyone else who worked on this ended up better for doing so, that’s a great reason to have made it.

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