In their second annual report, Frictional Games have detailed the continuing success of Amnesia, and give credit to their modding community, and the Let’s Play makers on Youtube. The headline: Amnesia has sold a lot. A hell of a lot. About a million copies so far.
The actual number is open to debate – as the game has been heavily bundled including in the Humble Indie Bundle, and Valve’s Potato Sack Bundle. Writing on the Frictional Games blog Thomas Grip “Adding all HIB and Potato Sack sales gets us to 1 360 00 units in total, which can be called the optimistic figure. This means that, optimistically speaking, Amnesia has sold almost 1.4 million units!”. However they acknowledge that many of those bundle sales included people that already owned Amnesia “A slightly pessimistic guess (not far from reality I think) is that 2/3 of every bundle and pack buyer already owned Amnesia. This gives us about 920 000 units in total, pessimistically speaking. So saying that we have sold a million units seems fair. Wait… a million units! Oh shit!!”
With such a success, they didn’t even give piracy a second thought. “It has been over a year since we even thought about piracy. With sales as good as above we cannot really see this as an issue worth more than two lines in this post, so screw it.”
The success they say is not only down to how efficient Amnesia is at inflicting pure terror, but to the modding community and Youtube “Amnesia is as of writing the 2nd most popular game at ModDB and sports 176 finished mods. Not only do this amount of user content lengthen the life of the game, it has also increased the amount of YouTube movies made with an Amnesia theme. There are lots of popular Let’s Play channels that have devoted quite a bit of time with just playing various user-made custom stories.”
Their next job: their collaboration with Dear Esther developers thechineseroom on Annedia: A Machine For Pigs. “This release will be very interesting in many ways. First of all it is a big experiment for us to do this sort of collaboration, so from the start we had no idea how it would turn out. Judging from the latest build we have nothing to worry about though, and so far it looks great. Another interesting aspect is how well it will sell compared to the initial Amnesia launch. Not only is the market a lot bigger now than two years ago, Amnesia is more more known. The result will be very important to how we plan our future. Release for AMFP is expected early 2013.”
Then, there’s their next self-developed game: another first-person horror game. “One of the things I was most disappointed with in Amnesia was that it never really managed to deliver any deeper themes, but was more like a shallow fright-fest. For the new project we want to change that and really try and bring a certain theme to the front. Our hope is that this will create a very special experience, creating horror in a much more disturbing way.”