Tale of Tales quits game development after poor Sunset sales

It's sad times for gaming, with two of its most artistically minded developers stepping away from development with the announcement that Tale of Tales will no longer be making games.

Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn made the decision to stop making video games after their latest release, Sunset, was released to a mixture of critical acclaim and low sales.

In a blogpost the pair elaborated on their reasoning, explaining how ad campaigns and putting their game in the recently-ended Steam sale at half price weren't enough to drive sales, and at the time of writing they had only shifted a relatively low 4,000 copies.

In the end, we spent more money than we had on the production of Sunset. Because we wanted to make it really good and reach a wider audience. Compared to the ambitions we had for the game, the extra $40,000 seemed like a relatively small sum. "Surely we can make that amount back in the first month of sales!"

We were wrong.

So far a little over 4,000 copies of Sunset have changed hands. That includes the copies for our backers on Kickstarter. That includes the sale. There's barely enough income to keep our company going while we look for ways to raise the funds to pay back our debts.

It's hard to deal with this intense feeling of disappointment in a context of glowing reviews and compliments and encouragement from players. A small group of people clearly deeply appreciates what we do and we curse the economic system that doesn't allow us to be pleased with that.

In the same post the pair explained the process of working with their PR company, advertising on a prominent PC site, being careful with their message; all to no avail.

Now it seems that they're embracing the situation, moving away from commercial game making, and looking to find the positives from the situation.

So now we are free. We don't have to take advice from anybody anymore. We were wrong. Everybody whom we consulted with on Sunset was wrong.

We are happy and proud that we have tried to make a "game for gamers." We really did our best with Sunset, our very best. And we failed. So that's one thing we never need to do again. Creativity still burns wildly in our hearts but we don't think we will be making videogames after this. And if we do, definitely not commercial ones.

Sad times indeed. The video game industry needs more artistry, not less, and with Tale of Tales taking their undeniable creative talents elsewhere, it can only be a negative thing for the wider gaming world.