Will a game programmed in Jonathan Blow's language, Jai gross more than $10,000,000 before 2033?
$10,000,000 defined in USD, Sept 2023. Actual target will adjust with inflation.
Resolution will default to approximate revenue estimates by https://steam-revenue-calculator.com/, though if a knowledgable party can confirm revenue from all platforms in excess of ten million, market will resolve Yes.
If some other method of revenue estimation becomes standard over the next decade, resolution criteria can shift.
1,000
1.00IMO this is entirely a question about whether Jonathan Blow's next game (the sokoban-like puzzle game he is working on during his livestreams) earns over $10M as defined by your methodology.
- I don't expect there will be that many games developed with Jai, and I expect any non-Jonathan-Blow-developed games will be too small to have much chance of earning $10M (even Braid Anniversary has only earned about $120K, according to your calculator with 300 reviews and a $20 price tag!) If some random person makes a zachtronics-style game with Jai, for example, I doubt that would crack $10M.
- Jonathan Blow himself will probably not have time to release his sokoban game, and then release ANOTHER game, by 2033. His games take a long time!
Furthermore, I am doubtful that even this sokoban game will sell as many copies as The Witness (which made $14M according to your estimator, or even more of today's dollars if we adjust for inflation, since it released way back in 2016):
- I think The Witness benefited significantly from getting a trailer during the initial reveal of the PS4; it might be harder to reach people in the same way the next time around
- personally, the finnicky top-down puzzles of sokoban are less fun to me than the experience of wandering around an island in first-person perspective; I expect that other people might feel similarly -- this sokoban game feels more narrowly targeted at the "thinky puzzle game" community
- Jonathan blow might choose to distribute the sokoban game in an unusual way that results in low steam sales -- perhaps it'll sign an exclusivity deal with Epic or Netflix or something, or perhaps he'll sell it through his own platform as a DRM-free, open-source game that can be modified by players (sacrificing some profits to advance his larger mission of promoting the Jai language and positively influencing the trajectory of the games industry / the practice of software coding / etc), or something like that.
On the other hand:
- the sokoban game actually has characters, perhaps music, a voice-acted story, etc -- this might make it easier to explain what the game is about and make it feel compelling to people. (Also, they'll be able to actually talk about the core game mechanics this time, lol.)
- $10M is less than The Witness made, even by your calculator's reckoning. so the Sokoban game does not have to be quite as successful as the Witness
- who knows, maybe the sokoban game will become very popular due to some unique thing that Jonathan Blow includes (like letting players design and share their own levels, or doing the weird open-source thing I mentioned, or some other way of trying to use the puzzle game to hook people into the Jai community -- I am reminded of the success of stuff like LittleBigPlanet and Super Mario Maker)
@JacksonWagner having wrote all this with negative sentiment, I went to buy some "NO" shares and thought... you know, somehow JoBlow will probably figure out how to sell a lot of copies of this game. so idk how to feel overall, ended up buying some YES
Argh, I was hoping you forgot about inflation 😐
What is the user base of this language? To be honest, I didn’t manage to find any official docs or download link with a quick search, that’s not a good indicator