Where the Water Tastes Like Wine
Dim Bulb Games
Exceptional press coverage, a top-tier cast of writers, an original song by Sting — and a commercial failure documented publicly by its creator. The most instructive counter-example of the decade.
Press doesn't replace wishlists
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine had everything a classic marketing plan recommends. Massive press coverage: Polygon, Kotaku, PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun. A memorable art direction. An original song composed and performed by Sting. A cast of award-winning writers — Leigh Alexander, Cara Ellison, Emily Short. Showcases at PAX, an IGF Honorable Mention. On paper, everything ticked.
On 28 February 2018, the game released. A month later, Johnnemann Nordhagen published a rarely honest post-mortem on Medium: in the first weeks, the game sold fewer copies than he had Twitter followers — fewer than 5,000 copies. Four years of development, around $140,000 invested in contractors and collaborators, and $0 of personal revenue. Nordhagen himself publicly calls the result a commercial 'disaster'.
The post-mortem points to the exact mechanism, and that's what's valuable for any indie. Press generates awareness, not purchase intent. The articles were read by people who found the project interesting — not by players who were going to buy it that week. Meanwhile, the wishlist counter stayed low, the Steam algorithm saw no signal at release, and the initial promotion never triggered. No signal, no visibility, no snowball.
This case is the inverse demonstration of Among Us. A game can have real media visibility and stay invisible exactly where it counts — in the metrics Steam measures to decide what to push. Press is an amplifier of an existing signal, never a generator of the initial signal.