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Amnesia Sold Above Expectations
The breathtaking horror game beat the sales targets that Swedish developer Frictional Games set for it by a whopping 50 percent, according to a post on the studio's blog. That sounds like awesome news for the fledgling company, until you look deeper and see that the PC/Mac/Linux title Amnesia: The Dark Descent has moved 36,000 units in total – the "expectations" in this case were the bare minimum sales required for Frictional to keep its five developers on staff and the doors open.
Frictional goes on to note its disappointment at the apparent disparity between the game's thunderous critical response (including my glowing 9.25/10 review here) and lukewarm sales, though they rightly point out that positive reviews have more of an impact on a game's sales down the line as opposed to generating big spikes of purchases.
Finally, the studio notes the vast gulf between sales Amnesia and Minecraft – that other Scandinavian indie game you may have heard of, which has sold over a half million copies to date – and posits that much of the difference is due to piracy. Minecraft has only twice as many torrent trackers (the brigs in which pirates sail the online seas, to torture a metaphor) as Amnesia while enjoying over 10 times the sales. Of course, Minecraft has a business model that encourages users to purchase legit copies, with constant free patches and online play requiring a valid install. Amnesia, on the other hand, is a single-player only experience that has very little replayability and no ongoing content updates. Unfortunately, the blog notes, those kinds of experiences are exactly what the team at Frictional is interested in creating.
If you're on the fence, let me assure you that Amnesia is a fantastic title that will change the way you think about horror games. I can pretty well guarantee you that it's going on my personal games of the year list. It's that good. Go check out the free demo, and hopefully be swayed to show your support for the people who take risks to push the boundaries of what video games can be.
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