Josef Fares is one of the games industry’s most colorful personalities, fondly remembered for his hilarious speech at The Game Awards 2018 in particular. But he’s also highly regarded as a talented filmmaker and video game director, having led the team’s behind Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and A Way Out.
Today, in a candid interview with IGN, Fares spoke about the success of the latter, revealing its impressive sales figures.
According to Fares, A Way Out has sold almost 3.5 million units, which in turn could mean that around 7 million have played the game given that it requires two players to complete:
“When I believe in something, nothing can stop me. Obviously, no one believed in [A Way Out] – not even EA thought it would sell, but they still believed in me. I didn’t care. I was like, ‘This is going to happen.’ Now, we’ve sold almost 3.5 million units of that game. These numbers for a small team of 30, 35 people are madness, you know? And at 3.5 million units sold, that means that, I don’t know, almost seven million people played this game, which is crazy.”
That would mean A Way Out has sold nearly 1.5 million units since August of 2019 when we had our last official update.
Later in the interview, Fares discusses his vision for his next project, which he describes as being markedly different from A Way Out:
“No, no, no, no, no. The next game I have in my head is very different to this. I mean, very different. […] This is not the new tone for the kind of game we’re doing. The next game is totally different. It’s something totally else, which is so cool. We’re going to start with it in the next month.”
There’s plenty more interesting takeaways from the rest of the interview, especially pertaining to Fares’ belief that story-driven games need to feature a new, evolved gameplay design that makes sense within the context of the narrative they are trying to tell.
