Controversial as that ending might be, it is hard to deny that Firewatch stuck with many people due to its mysterious setting and the gorgeous visual style. Now some data regarding the game's performance shortly after release indicates that the game hasn't just been doing well, it's been doing amazingly well.
Publisher Panic posted a blog post detailing how the game was received by the media and the players on their official website. The publisher says that the game's budget, while modest in comparison to the AAA games in the industry, was still substantial for the small publisher and developer. Luckily, they managed to recoup their investment way beyond what was expected and the game managed to sell around half a million copies in its first month, which means that they had made back their investment in just one day. The blog post mentions that the game even managed to stay at the top of the digital sales list on PlayStation, which is kind of huge if you don't have the marketing budget or the name recognition of an EA or a Ubisoft.
Even though the game is a financial success that surpassed expectations, the developer isn't resting on its laurels. They have been actively working on improving the game's performance on console and they are committed to continue working on fixing the game's bugs.
They also talked about the game's divisive ending:
when you make a game, you’re telling a story, and there’s no “patch” in the world that will make a story perfect for everyone. We were fully prepared for this, but: some people really loved Firewatch’s ending, others didn’t. Both opinions are completely valid. But we wanted to tell a ‘real-life’ story, and those often end quietly and sadly. We’re just grateful people played enough to have an opinion!One of the game's features was that you could use a camera you found in-game to snap pics of the environment and send them to the developer to get them developed and sent to you. Since the game's release last month, more than 1000 rolls have been shipped to players, and players have uploaded well over 200k pics themselves. That's a pretty great real-world tie-in to the fictional world of Firewatch.
Firewatch was made by Campo Santo and released last month for PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows. The game went on to get a lot of critical acclaim and, as it turns out, managed to garner quite the fanbase. Our review praised the game scoring it at 7.5 out of 10.
