The Witness is selling very well, despite rampant piracy

The Witness is a hard nut to crack. It's arguably one of the toughest puzzle games going at the moment, and yet it's selling quite well. So says creator Jonathan Blow, who tweeted at the weekend that it's currently performing better than his landmark debut title Braid did.

He goes on to say that, at the current rate of sales, his team may be able to develop another game with a "comparable budget", or maybe even a bigger one.

These sales include purchases on both Steam and PSN, where the game released exclusively for consoles. Blow mentions that the stats on SteamSpy are a bit off the mark at the moment (the site says 38,841 people own it at present), though that's to be expected in the early days of a game's launch.

It's good news, because aside from The Witness being a remarkable game, the sales seem to strong despite Blow's recent complaints that piracy of the game is rampant. "It seems The Witness is the #1 game on a certain popular torrent site," Blow tweeted the other day. "Unfortunately this will not help us afford to make another game!"

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.