We’re happy to announce that today we paid off our loan to CultuurInvest for the production of The Path. We are debt free! That took about 35,000 sales. The loan only covers part of the entire production budget. But the rest was funded with subsidies and art grants with much more modest expectations of return on investment.
Ergo: as of now, every copy of The Path sold contributes to new Tales of Tales!
Or returning to an old one…
Go go good guys!
I bought seven copies of ‘The Path’ just to help out a little extra.
Aaron, you’re crazy, but we love you <3
Well I bought 2 copies of the game, because of my switch to mac, plus i made the danish translation (Still excited to see it released… all of my friends will have to buy a copy of the path then 😀 ).
Thank you!
Translation will be out soon!
Excellent, congratulations!
Though I’d have hoped you’d have more sales than that by this point.
I think our number of sales is pretty decent for a digital download non-console indie game. But it’s hard to know because there’s not a lot of figures available to compare with. Which is why we decided to share ours.
Anyway, if we can continue to fund our production by combining art grants and player purchases, we’re more than happy. That way we can do our work with very little concessions to the market and without being entirely dependent on subsidies either.
Also, we’re not done selling The Path yet!… The number will increase. Especially now that being debt-free will allow us to re-invest some of the income in supporting the project.
I don’t know if this is the moment or the place, but I’m curious, how is the thing going with FATALE?
And yes, we paid off Auriea’s mortgage in Animal Crossing especially to get that picture! 😉
It was a combined effort of the whole family.
It’s way too early to tell, Jorge. We only launched Fatale last Monday. But it’s not as critical a project as The Path, financially. It was a lot cheaper to make and we didn’t take out a loan for it. So we’re already debt-free for Fatale. 😉
Great! Because I want to see “8” finished! 😛
Great going! I’m still hoping there will be a boxed release in the BeNeLux eventually, like in Poland. 😉
Have you ever tried talking with the interactive fiction community for a little extra promotion? Especially their two lead magazines http://www.sparkynet.com/spag/ and http://www.xyzzynews.com/ ? Of course these people are mainly working with text-based games but usually the community is rather open to other fiction-like works outside their immediate area of interest.
At last! Now we can all sleep quietly and trouble-free. What’s next? Michaël and Auriea on the Forbes magazine cover? I can see it in my mind already:
“Tale of Tales: The success of successes”
(try saying it three times very quickly!)
I love you all. <3 … But also your games. … So make more. And I will make unending purchases on your behalf. Dozens.. Nay, hundreds of purchases!
Congratulations!
That’s excellent to hear!
And this isn’t selfish at all, but how great would it be to see 8 revisited?
I remember I was in Pittsburg a year and a half ago talking with some other indies about that loan, and of course we were duly skeptical that your approach to gameplay would sell enough to pay off the loan. I was concerned because debt is a horrible thing and totally kills the creative vibe, also your owning stuff ect. I don’t believe in financing a start-up or project with debt, its too speculative, you have to raise equity from investors who know that they risk losing everything.
Anyways, glad to see your leverage trade into art history has reached par!
I might be moving into money management for a year or two, ironically this will probably help my game design as I will no longer have to answer to money-worried Argentinos.
Thank you for your concern Patrick 😉
every project is different. We would not have taken out a loan to complete just any game idea. It required a great deal of faith.