Amnesia: The Dark Descent Turns One - News
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 09 September 2011 / 3,020 Views
One of my favorite games from the past year is celebrating its first birthday.
A year has passed since Frictional Games released Amnesia: The Dark Descent on the PC and the Swedish game developer says a lot has changed in that time. With sales of the survival horror game reaching around 400K, the company has gone from near bankruptcy to financial stability. "Everybody in the company has gotten raised salaries and we have more than enough money to complete our next game," writes Frictional Games' Thomas Grip.
According to the developer, about 75 percent of all copies sold were on sale. Around 50 percent of its earnings came from those discounted sales, but Frictional says day-to-day sales are also doing exceptionally well. "Right now we are selling around 6,000 units per month at full price," says Grip. "This is actually more than enough to cover all salaries and operational costs for each month, which is a situation we still have not really gotten used to."
Grip adds that sales have almost doubled compared to what they were six months ago. Nine percent of those sales were physical retail copies.
It turns out, however, that the success of Amnesia has had little to no effect on Frictional's earlier games, the Penumbra series. "The number of monthly visitors for Penumbra are still the same as they were before Amnesia," says Grip. "Same with sales; the monthly total is still a little above 500, which it has been for over two years now. The only influence Amnesia could have had is to keep the average up."
Frictional believes gamers have not been able to connect the two titles. The developer says that when Amnesia is given attention in the press, Penumbra is almost never mentioned, so fans of Amnesia don't know that similar games are available.
As for the future, Frictional says it wants to get up to speed on its next game and, apparently, it has its eye on the console market. "Right now our main income comes from very few channels, and we need to spread out the risk somehow," Grip explains. "The other reason is that we feel we are missing out on exposure by not being on a console and not reaching as many players as we should be able to."
Frictional says it plans to use the lessons it learned during the development of Amnesia and take them to the next level. While its next title might not be a survival horror game, it will have a scary atmosphere and more intellectually demanding subjects. The developer says it wants to get past having classical puzzles that break the flow of game play, but doesn't want to make a "spoon-fed type of experience."
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... and still not on consoles!
I really need to get around to playing this game because it looks like it would be a great thrill.
If you check the quick preview on Steam for Amnesia, the environment is very creepy. It's a point and click type of game hybrid, but it does an excellent job setting you up for an eery scene. Honestly give it a shot, or at least check out trailers on Steam.
