Amnesia - Two Years Later

Introduction
It has now passed a small much more than two years because we launched Amnesia and 1 year considering that the last report, so time for another! One would think that there is probably not significantly to be mentioned this extended soon after release, specially for a single player game with no constructed-in social attributes. But the truth is that Amnesia is nonetheless going very robust and 2012 will most likely be the very best economic year right here at Frictional Games, which we would by no means had expected two years ago.

Sales
As often, let's begin with the sales and some numbers. The very first issue will be to figure out how several units we have sold in total, which is in fact genuinely challenging to pin down. The largest reasons for the uncertainty is that Amnesia was element of the Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) earlier this year and Potato Bundle final year. Both of these account for very a lot of sales. Without having counting the units bought there our total lands at 710 000 units. Adding all HIB and Potato Sack sales gets us to 1 360 000 units in total, which can be named the optimistic figure. This implies that, optimistically speaking, Amnesia has sold nearly 1.4 million units! This reasoning is not strictly speaking invalid, but I think that 1 must not actually count any person that bought the bundle and already owned Amnesia as a proper unit. A slightly pessimistic guess (not far from reality I believe) is that two/3 of each bundle and pack purchaser already owned Amnesia. This offers us about 920 000 units in total, pessimistically speaking. So saying that we have sold a million units appears fair. Wait... a million units! Oh shit!!

In spite of that enormous number of sales, what I feel is a lot more exciting is how excellent the month-to-month sales nonetheless are. Not counting any discounts, the month-to-month complete price tag sales lie at more than ten 000 units. This implies that less then each and every 5th minute a person in the planet is purchasing a copy of Amnesia. This is totally insane to me. The figures themselves are far beyond any guesses we would have created two years ago. It is also insane, due to the fact this quantity is really higher than it was about three months after initial launch. That a game can nonetheless be going this good two years after is actually remarkable.  This accomplishment is due to a lot of factors, some of which are the uniqueness of the game (horror games without having combat do not truly exist on Pc), the massive modding neighborhood (more on this later) and the steady flood of YouTube clips (which is in turn is fueled by the modding neighborhood output).

Also worth noting that our Penumbra games are nonetheless going on at the same price that they often have. They are nevertheless selling about the same numbers (a tiny a lot more actually) as they did 3 years ago. This totals to about 900 units per month. Taking all sales together is a lot more than enough to assistance the organization, financing A Machine For Pigs (far more on that later) and getting some left over. This signifies that we are in a extremely good position and aim to use it to take a lot more threat and try out new items (much more on this later).

I feel we have by no means disclosed how significantly we Amnesia cost to make, so may as well do that right here. The (precisely) three years of development price a total of 360 000 US Dollars. It has considering that earned far more than ten times that. Take that investors we talked to in 2009!

Piracy
It has been more than a year since we even believed about piracy. With sales as excellent as above we can't truly see this as an situation worth more than two lines in this post, so screw it.

Modding
I mentioned it a bit in last years summary, but really feel it was not offered sufficient concentrate. When we designed the possibility of custom stories, it was something we believed of really late and I feel Luis implemented it in significantly less than a day. We place a handful of days on adding documentation our wiki as nicely, but all in all, it was a tiny effort compared to the rest of the game. Despite that, this aspect as been immensely important for the game and even though it is challenging to give any precise features in terms of sales, the influence on our community is easily observed. Before modding started, we had 1 or two daily post on our message boards. But as the modding neighborhood has grown, it is now up in more than 40! (Keep in mind this on the boards of a two year old a single player game.) There is even a long meme thread regarding the custom story neighborhood. What is intriguing is that there are even internal expressions utilized, like "poofer", that we at Frictional did not know about and that was distinct to Amnesia modding.

The output of modding community has been quite huge as nicely. Amnesia is as of writing the 2nd most well-liked game at ModDB and sports 176 completed mods. Not only do this quantity of user content material lengthen the life of the game, it has also improved the quantity of YouTube movies created with an Amnesia theme. There are lots of well-known Let's Play channels that have devoted very a bit of time with just playing various user-made custom stories. As pointed out earlier this have possibly played a large role in keeping our monthly sales up.

It is very clear that allowing customers to create content material is a function worth placing time into. I also consider that we managed to have a fairly very good balance amongst having easy tools and nonetheless permitting a lot of possibilities. It is far from ideal even though and for our new engine (which AMFP is not using) will have lots of improvements. It will nevertheless be attainable to use the simple scripting as before, but now you can fairly significantly remake what ever you like and do not have to use a complicated total conversion to do so.

Future
The subsequent big point for us will be the release of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, which is a follow-up created by thechineseroom and created by us. This release will be quite interesting in several methods. Very first of all it is a big experiment for us to do this sort of collaboration, so from the begin we had no notion how it would turn out. Judging from the latest develop we have practically nothing to worry about even though, and so far it looks wonderful. Yet another exciting aspect is how properly it will sell compared to the initial Amnesia launch. Not only is the market place a lot larger now than two years ago, Amnesia is more known. The outcome will be quite crucial to how we strategy our future. Release for AMFP is expected early 2013.

At Frictional Games our main concern is our new super secret project. We do not want to say considerably about this project but,but we can disclose that it will be horror and that it will be initial person. 1 of the things I was most disappointed with in Amnesia was that it by no means truly managed to provide any deeper themes, but was more like a shallow fright-fest. For the new project we want to modify that and truly attempt and bring a certain theme to the front. Our hope is that this will create a very unique knowledge, generating horror in a much much more disturbing way. For the curious, some details on the path we are taking can be located in this paper. The game's current status is that we have fairly a lot all tech functioning, and have began to playtest the very first components. Nonetheless, a lot is up in the air and the present design is bound to change. Although we do not want the project to go on forever, we want to use our very good monetary scenario the ideal we can and make confident we do not just rush one thing out (which we did with Amnesia truly). Release will most likely be some time in 2014.

Frictional Games have also grown more than the last year and we now employ 11 people, which feels extremely close to the maximum. At least the way we run the organization right now. We also do not want to lose the little underdog spirit that has fueled us in the previous. When you have such financially various predicament compared to when you started I think it is simple to get caught up in expansion, wild ideas and essentially do not get much carried out. So, we do our best to maintain our feet firmly on the ground, to be strict on deadlines and to always keep in mind our humble pasts. At the very same time we will not take any effortless solutions and play it protected. Soon after the successes we have had, I consider it is our responsibility to use our cash and independence the ideal way achievable.