Happy birthday you terrifying thing, you!

Well folks, Amnesia: The Dark Descent turned two years old over the weekend and things are still looking pretty damn good for the indie darling. In a detailed blog-post and post-mortem, Thomas Grip, the owner of Frictional Games, revealed that Amnesia has roughly sold 1,360,000 copies overall and (in an admittedly pessimistic estimation) around 962,000 of those copies were original purchases (the others were second copies that were likely purchased in Humble Indie Bundle V). Even more impressively is the fact that purchases of the game at full price still average around 10,000 copies monthly, despite it being two years old. Frictional Games’ other big game franchise, Penumbra is still pulling in a respectable sales of around 900 copies a month.

These sales haven’t only been very impressive (Amnesia’s sales have brought in over ten times its budget, which was revealed to be $360,000) but they are being used for two important projects: Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, which is being developed by thechineseroom (the development team behind Dear Esther), and a secret project. Not many details were revealed but Grip did reveal that the game would be another first-person horror game and that the technology powering the game and the first parts of the game have tested well but a lot is still up in the air. The game is due out in 2014. It has also been revealed by Grip that Frictional Games wants to make this new project a lot deeper. According to Grip:

“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.”

The rest of the post details many aspects of developing the game, as well as a few tidbits about the modding community and some other thoughts. On that note, I’ll leave you with Grip’s opinion on Piracy:

“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.”

Gabriel B.

Gaming fan with no money to spare. Loves playing indie games, especially freeware.

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