Order of the Sinking Star sold 45% more units on Steam in its first week than The Witness did in 2016, and its peak concurrent player count on Steam beat The Witness’s by 33%, developer Thekla and publisher Arc Games said in a Steam announcement on October 16. The puzzle adventure from Jonathan Blow launched on October 8 for PC, PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2 at $29.99.
The comparison matters because The Witness was the yardstick for a big independent puzzle game. Order of the Sinking Star spent ten years in development, and its first week says that bet paid off, at least on Steam.
One of the game's more than 1,000 handcrafted puzzles, here built around light beams. Image: Thekla, Inc. / Arc Games
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Order of the Sinking Star sales: what Thekla and Arc Games said
The “thank you” post lists the first-week milestones the companies chose to share:
- Steam units: 45% more in week one than The Witness.
- Steam peak concurrent players: 33% above The Witness’s peak.
- Steam reviews: “Overwhelmingly Positive” with more than 2,000 reviews. When we checked at 18:15 UTC on October 17, the count was 2,539 reviews, 97% of them positive.
- Store placement: top 5 in Steam’s Popular New Releases at launch, top 10 among Steam’s single-player top sellers, top 15 on the Nintendo eShop best-seller list, and a spot in the PlayStation Store’s What’s Hot section.
No unit totals were given, and the PS5 and Switch 2 versions were described only by their store rankings.
Blow: cheaper game, “at least as financially successful”
Blow had shared the first number a day earlier. In a post on X on October 15, he said he ran the comparison on Steam “where it’s easy”. He was also quick to add context: Order is 25% cheaper, since The Witness cost $40 and Order costs $30, with some bundle discounts on top and a decade of inflation in between. So more units were to be expected. “But regardless, it looks at least as financially successful as the Witness was, maybe a little more eventually, depending on how the tail goes,” he wrote.
The simple math backs up that cautious wording. At list prices, 1.45 times the units at 75% of the price works out to roughly 9% more gross revenue on Steam. That’s before bundle discounts and before adjusting for inflation, which together could easily wipe out the gap. “About the same, maybe a bit better” is a fair reading. A runaway hit it isn’t.
| The Witness | Order of the Sinking Star | |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | January 26, 2016 | October 8, 2026 |
| Launch platforms | PC, PS4 | PC, PS5, Switch 2 |
| Steam price | $39.99 | $29.99 |
| Week one on Steam | Baseline | +45% units, +33% peak players |
How big was The Witness’s first week?
For scale, Blow wrote in a February 2016 blog post that The Witness grossed more than $5 million in its first week across all platforms and sold “substantially more than 100,000 units”. He said at the time that he couldn’t be precise about individual platforms, so the Steam baseline behind the new 45% figure isn’t public. Order’s actual Steam unit count can’t be worked out from these numbers.
The result still stands out among this month’s sales announcements. Like Remedy’s CONTROL Resonant passing one million sales, it’s a figure the developer published itself, which makes it firmer than the analyst estimates behind stories such as Ghost of Yotei’s sales compared with Tsushima.
Order of the Sinking Star costs $29.99 on Steam, PS5 and Switch 2, $10 less than The Witness at launch. Image: Thekla, Inc. / Arc Games
What players should know: patches and a known reset bug
Thekla has been shipping fixes almost daily since launch. The latest, a patch on October 17, fixes a missing lily in an end-game level and a bug that could stop you from swapping characters. It also flags a known issue: since the October 16 update, reset can fail to properly reset a level. Until a fix ships, Thekla’s workaround is to undo back to the start of the level, after which reset works again.
What’s next
Thekla and Arc Games say they are still improving performance on every platform and finishing the localization work. The next promised additions are Chinese voice-over narration and the Japanese version of the game on consoles. Neither has a date yet. For more independent games on the way, see our ID@Xbox Showcase preview for October 20.
Sources: Thekla & Arc Games (Steam, Oct 16), Jonathan Blow on X (Oct 15), Order of the Sinking Star patch notes (Oct 17), The Witness blog (Feb 2016), Steam store page.
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Featured image: Thekla, Inc. / Arc Games
