Amnesia - One year later

Introduction
A year has passed since we first released Amnesia and a lot has changed for us at Frictional Games since. We have gone from being pretty much out of money, to being financially stable in a way we never thought we would be. Everybody in the company has gotten raised salaries and we have more than enough money to complete our next game.

Our financial situation is far from the only change though. The success of Amnesia has led to us getting a lot more known among players and the press. Reactions to the game are still pouring in, and it feels extremely good and humbling to be able to have that kind of impact on people.

With that little summary, now let's get down and dirty with some more detailed information. (And oh, see end of post for a wee surprise.)


Sales
Let's start with what most people probably are the most interested in: how many units have we actually sold? During the GDC EU lecture I noted that we were now above 400k units total, but as we scrutinized all of the figures it turns out this was not quite correct. Jens did a recount of all income we have gotten so far and the figure ended on 391 102 units (which is of course not correct when you read this as the game sells at about 2 mHz).

This sounds like a huge amount for sure, but there is something to consider with this figure. About 75% of all the sold copies, that is 300k, were on discounted sale. This is quite substantial really, especially when you note that a good deal (almost half) of the remaining 100k were sold at launch. In the end this amounts to around 50% of all our earnings coming purely from discounted sales (most at a 66% or higher discount).

While discounted sales indeed dwarfs our normal sales, the day-to-day sales are quite expectational as well. Right now we are selling around 6000 units per month at full price. 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. Another interesting fact is that monthly sales have actually increased, they are almost double now from what they were half a year ago. What all this means is that we can work with a healthy buffer that makes it possible to take more risks and down the road spend more money on outsourcing for sound, voices, art and more. Both of which should allows to make our next game as good as possible.

The distribution between platforms depends a bit on how you count it. In our own store it is as follows:
Windows: 70%
Linux: 15%
Mac: 15%
However, our store is the only one that sell a Linux version of the game, so in total sales the percentage of Linux is a lot less. When looking at other stores the distribution is around 11% Mac and 89% Windows. The Mac percentage goes down a bit during sales, where Windows sales increase 3 times or so more compared to the Mac ones. An interesting note here is that Mac sales in our own store did not go down as a other online outlets like Steam started to provide mac versions; meaning it did not steal our customers but opened up to a new market. We think it is a good incentive for other stores to support Linux as well!

The final data regarding sales is the difference between physical and digital sales. As of now, a total of 35, 000 boxed copies of the game has been sold, or around 9% of total sales. This is not too shabby considering we had no release in Europe and that the American box came out half a year after launch. The money earned from a physical unit is much less than from a digital one, but a physical release can still be helpful (however, other problem arise that might make it not worth it, something we will cover later on).


Impact on Penumbra
As Amnesia gained popularity, we already had our Penumbra games up for sale. We were quite curious in seeing how these sales would be affected by Amnesia's success. As Penumbra is quite similar to Amnesia i terms of gameplay and mood, and that both were made by the same company, we thought that we would see a boost in sales and attention for Penumbra. Turns out that Penumbra was almost not affected at all.

The number of monthly visitors for Penumbra are still the same as they were before Amnesia. 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.

So why did Amnesia have no (or very little impact) on the sales of Penumbra? We think one reason is that main bulk of Amnesia buyers simply does not connect the two. While they are similar, the first look is quite different. Penumbra takes place in present day and Amnesia in the 19th century. Another reason is that whenever there is some exposure for Amnesia, Penumbra is almost never mentioned, so most people that enjoyed Amnesia never learn there is a similar game available.


User response
I noted earlier that the daily sales have gone up over the last year, and large part of that has been due this - responses from the players. Still now, a year later, once a week or more some new post about Amnesia goes up on reddit, youtube or a similar user generated site. This kind of constant bombardment of Amnesia related material has continued to raise awareness of the game.

The major example of this would be the the Amnesia WTF video that reached 4 million views before YouTube, because of mysterious reasons, removed it (here is a copy). Others include this pug picture that managed to spread quite virally, images like this one, and much more.

Another pleasant surprise was the amount of custom stories that have been made. In Penumbra we only knew of a single attempt to make a user-created level and that one was never released in public. For Amnesia at least 300 custom story projects have been started, and 20 or so have actually become completed, high quality, experiences. There has even been a Tetris clone made with the tools!

This surge in interest has made our community a lot more active too. A year after we released Penumbra: Black Plague, our forum was quite dead, having a post every other day or so. Right now we average about 200 posts / day, and all of it is pretty much thanks to the custom story creation. This has also spread to other parts of the forum, and there is a lot more general chatter, technical help between users, etc . It really shows that supplying users with creation tools is well worth the time.


The making of Amnesia
As a year has gone by a few resources on how Amnesia was made has popped up, so it seems like a good time to sum them up now:

The Terrifying Tale of Amnesia
A post-mortem of Amnesia at the Escapist, that describes what we went through when creating the game. It mostly deals with the financial side, but also on how corporate decisions lead to changes in design, screwed everything up, and other juicy stuff like that.

Birth of a Monster
The design and production process of the grunt monster, written by several of the people involved. Do not forget that there is a second part.

Evoking Emotions and Achieving Success By Breaking all the Rules
A talk I gave at GDC Europe about a month ago. It goes over a lot of the design decisions that went into Amnesia.


Next for Frictional
So what is next for us at Frictional Games?

First of all, we want to get up to speed on our next game. Since we spent all resources we had on getting Amnesia done, we had to start the new project without any sort of momentum. Added to this was the potato thingie that also took a lot of time (but was really worthwhile). This has lead to a discrepancy between design, technology and art that we just about caught up to now. We have done a lot of work on the next game, but it is not until now we are close to having a nice work flow.

Because of this, a major issue for us to fix is to be able to manage multiple projects. We want to have a nice reallocation of resources at the end of each project and make sure to keep the flow going. However we do not want to grow the company too much, and thus we are looking into other avenues. If everything goes as it should we will announce our first stab at a solution to this quite soon!

Another big change for the future will be consoles. The main reason for choosing consoles is purely financial. Right now our main income comes from very few channels, and we need to spread out the risk somehow. 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. Unfortunately consoles are really old compared to the PC right now, so it will be far from straightforward to develop for two platforms. Our current thinking is to make the console get a lower end version and make sure console specs influence the PC version as little as possible.

Finally, in regards to what our next project is about, the basic idea is to use lessons learned from Amnesia and then take it to the next level. We have mentioned before that the next game will not be as horror focused as our past ones, but still have a scary atmosphere. Our intention this time is to dig into deeper and more intellectually demanding subjects. Another goal for us is to get past having classical puzzles that break the flow, but without making the game into a spoon-fed type of experience.

We are all really excited about the future, with tons of ideas we want to try out and now with the resources to do so properly. This is the first time for us developing a project that we know we can fund all the way and not worry about tight resources. It will be very interesting so see what will be possible to create this time!


More questions?
Anything else you want to know? Well, you are in luck because the entire team will be available for an Ask-Us-Anything at Reddit! Just go here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/k9vwj/we_are_frictional_games_creators_of_amnesia_the/

It is really simple to register at reddit, so just do so and fire away in case you are curious! And do make sure to up-vote it so it gets some exposure!

And finally, thanks to all who have supported us, pre-ordered our games, put up crazy stuff on the internet, provided help in the forums and in other ways helped to spread the word!

Why not release a game on Steam that has been ported to Mac?

As we have released all of our games for Windows, Mac and Linux and because we also release our games on Steam, this will be a quick reflection over the lack of games available for Mac that are not on Steam.

Looking at the Steam forums you can find a thread or two every now and then that brings up the topic "why are there many well known games, that are ported to Mac, but are not on Steam??".

The reason for this can be many: Perhaps there is a contractual limit or perhaps the company that did the Mac port have their own online store and only wants to sell the game in that store.

There has also been a mention here and there about SteamPlay, the feature on Steam that gives you a game for all platforms, even if you only bought it for Windows to begin with. This means that if you have a Mac as well, you get the game for Mac for free on Steam. Or the other way around of course. This might be viewed as a negative thing, because as the company porting the game, you have a lot of potential customers that will simply get your game for free. This makes SteamPlay also a possible cause not to release the game on Steam.

Bringing me to the point of this short blog post: As a long time Mac user, gamer and as someone that worked on quite a few Mac games over the years, I feel the urge to post a little "Steam is good, SteamPlay is good and if nothing stops you from releasing the game, do it."-suggestion.

Looking at our own sales, we have about 7-8% coming from Mac users. Last I heard, the Mac portion of the PC market was less than 7-8%! We have had this sale share since the very first month our games were released on Steam for Mac, so despite all the potential "lost sales" due to SteamPlay, we have sold as many copies as the Mac market should be able to support.

Let's take Penumbra Collection as an example; when it was released on Steam for Mac, the Mac sales accounted for 20% of the total sales of Penumbra Collection that month. This for a game that is to be considered old and have been available for the Mac elsewhere for as long (almost) as the PC version has been out.

If you are a Mac porting company, take a moment to think about it and if nothing stops you from releasing it on Steam, why not maximize the potential customer base?



Psst. Of course there are other originally Windows oriented stores that have support for the Mac, such as Gamer's Gate and Direct2Drive. Not to forget the newly released (long overdue) App Store by Apple themselves.

Four months after Amnesia's release

Introduction
Frictional Games have now officially existed for almost exactly four years (4 years and 7 days to be exact), Amnesia: The Dark Descent is our fourth game and it is now four month since we released it. Because of this we thought it was time for another round-up of sales and other stuff that has happened.

Those who have read our two previous reports might have noticed a small trend of the later being a little bit more positive than the earlier. This post will not be an exception and we can happily announce that things are looking better than ever for us. Summarizing all sales since release actually puts us in a state that we never imagined being in.


Sales
Let's start with what I guess people are most interested in - sales. When counting all online sales as well a the Russian retail copies, we have now sold almost 200, 000 units! This is a tremendous amount and more than we ever thought we would. Our "dream estimates" before release was something around 100k, and to be able to double that feels insane.

Note that more than half of these units have been sold at a discounted price (with as much has 75% of the price off), so the total earnings are not as much as it first sounds. Still, we are in incredible good financial situation right now. Also, the daily sales are still quite high and the average has not dropped below 200 units yet. This means that we can still pay all daily costs from these sales alone, allowing us to invest the other earnings into the future (for outsourcing, PR, etc). It also gives us a healthy buffer and allow us to manage any unexpected happenings the future might hold.

With these figures at hand, we must confess that it gives us new confidence for the PC. The sales that we have had (and are having) are more than enough to motivate developing a game with the PC as the main (and even only) platform. Based on what we have seen, the online PC market is just getting bigger and bigger, and we are convinced we are far from the end of this growth. We think that other developers that consider making their game exclusive to a console might want to think again.

However, our sales have not been typical and it is safe to say that we have earned more than most other indie PC games. We have been extremely lucky with our media coverage and gotten tons of free PR (more on this later), something that has greatly influenced our sales compared to other titles. As proof of this, in the Steam sales charts we have been among the top three games for Adventure and Indie categories almost the entire time since release, often quickly above many of the games that were released after ours. With this we do not seek to discourage others from creating PC games, we are just saying that 200k units is not something that should be expected after 4 months of sales of an indie game. The market does continue to grow though, and it might not be long before these kinds of numbers are considered perfectly normal.

There is another really important thing that needs to be taken into account: If we have had a publisher and sold according to current figures, we would not be in the state that we are in now. More likely, we would now be something more like our first sales summary post. We would probably just have paid back our advance, and just recently been receiving royalties (at a much lower rate, like 25% of what we get now). This means that we would probably be looking for a new publishing deal at this point instead of having the freedom we now have. This does not mean that publishers are evil, just that one should think carefully before signing up for anything. Releasing a game without any financial backing or help with marketing is quite a struggle, but if you pull it off it is well worth the effort!


Media and PR
While we tried to make as much noise as possible at the release of the game, our marketing efforts have been far from big. Our main tactics have been to spread movie clips from the game, releasing a playable demo and to send out review copies. We think that most of this paid off as much as we could have hoped for, with great responses to trailers, players liking the demo and awesome reviews. However, plenty of PR came from a quite unexpected source, namely from user generated content.

An idea that we threw around before release was to have some kind of audience reaction footage, like Rec and Paranormal activity trailers have had. Having too much to do, we just left the idea lying and never did anything about it. However, shortly after the release of Amnesia players made their own videos with exactly this content! The extent that these have spread is quite amazing, one video having 775k views at the time for writing. That is almost a million views! And without any cats!

As we have now entered a new year, there have of course been a lot of awards. What is extra exciting about that is that we actually have been gotten a few! Just recently we got three nominations for Independent Games Festival, something that we are very thrilled about. Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame was kind enough to name Amnesia his forth best game of the year. Elder Geek awarded us PC Game of the year which was quite unexpected. IGN is currently nominating us for best horror game of the year and also awarded us best horror and coolest atmosphere for PC. Plenty of other awards have been given too and we are extremely happy about this kind of response!

How has these awards and nominations been us PR wise? Unfortunately it is a bit hard to say as all were announced during the Christmas sales, a time when sales where much higher than usual. Now when it is over, we do see around a 75% increase in daily sales compared to before the Christmas sale started. We think the awards and nominations are part of this increase, but the increase in new players during the holidays have probably also helped spreading the word and boost the sales.

What we can tell though, is that the awards and nominations gotten us more attention from the media. Especially after the IGF nomination we have gotten a lot of mails regarding interviews, review requests and similar. So even if these kind of things are not crucial for current sales, they can prove very important for the future of our company.


Current situation and future
So obviously Amnesia has been a huge success for us at Frictional Games, but what does it mean for us as a company? First of all, we are now completely financially stable and have enough money to complete our next game without any problems. It also means that for the first time in our lives we can actually get decent salaries, something that I personally would never thought would be possible. This means that Frictional Games is no longer a struggling endeavor that we will continue until our energy runs out. Instead Frictional Games has now become a proper career, income provider and something we hope to continue for a long time forward. Compared to how we felt just a few months ago, often considering getting "proper jobs", this is quite a wonderful change!

Our financial situation also means that we are able to take some amount of risk. While we of course do not aim to go crazy, it means that we can try out new things without risk of going bankrupt. It also means that we might have means to release a new game more frequently than every other or third year. We have some ideas on how to approach this, and are actually in the process of trying some things out.

As for our plans to focus on consoles, as hinted above, this is something we are reconsidering. If online sales figures continue like they have with Amnesia, there is actually not any reason for us to release to anything but PC. Still, it would be foolish not to try consoles out and our current idea is to work together with a third party to do a port. This would mean that we can still can keep a small staff and not risk growing beyond our capabilities.

We are also hard at work with our new game which we are extremely excited about. While we still do not want to disclose to much, our goal is to take "experience based gameplay" to another level. We aim to use the emotions that Amnesia was able to provoke and to focus them in a different direction, which will hopefully give delightfully disturbing results.



Finally, a big thanks to everybody who have supported us over the years, played our game, spread the word, made crazy videos, etc. We hope you all will continue to support is into the future!

One Month after Amnesia's release

Introduction
It has now been pretty much exactly a month since we launched Amnesia: The Dark Descent. And since the post on a week after release was quite popular, we have decided to do a new overview on where we stand now. This time we will mainly focus on the sales and give some more accurate figures on how things have turned out for us.


The big picture
So, with one month of data to analyze, how did things go? I think it can be summed up with: Better than expected on all accounts! As of today we have sold a total of 36, 000 units (including pre-orders, but excluding boxed sales in Russia), and our goal, which would determine if we would continue or not, were 24,000. Having met and exceeded that goal already feels quite nice. Frictional Games will live to create another game!

15,000 (41.7%) of all sales were in the form of pre-orders, which is quite significant. Part of the explanation for this is that there was a 20% discount during pre-orders and we also believe that people are more inclined to buy a pre-order. With perks such as Steam pre-loading, people seem to think it is worth putting up money before release. And since there is no pirate alternative to a pre-order, it is more likely that people will go through with the purchase (more on pirating later). In any case, pre-orders is probably something we will focus on more for our next title.


Platform specifics
Gathering an exact percentage of sales for Linux turned out to be a bit complicated. Purchases made in our store gets all three platforms, which is the only place to get the Linux version. The total amount of sold units in our own store is about 5000. Since we can connect some of these sales with steam activations and similar, we can make a conservative estimate of 2500 Windows users, leaving 2500 left for Mac and Linux. And since this this is the only store for Linux users, we assume 70% of these are Linux. This means 1750 sold Linux units, or 5% of the total sales.

Mac sales are a bit simpler to estimate, and given the estimates from above plus some other data, comes to about 8% of the total sales. The interesting bit here is that just taking the last week into account the amount of mac sales lie at about 12%. This probably means that the Mac market takes longer to penetrate and that Mac owners might be more likely to buy an "old" game. Unfortunately we do not have data regarding this for Linux, but assume something similar happens there.


Media and user response
As we said in the last post, the response from the media and users have been overwhelming to say the least. Right now, we have 86% at Metacritic, 90% from users on Gamespot, and so on. Considering it is a niche and story based game this feels extra nice (which, as Kieron Gillen points out on RPS, usually get lower meta-scores). We could not be any happier than we are with this response.

So how has this affected the sales? Well it is obviously impossible to say what we would have sold with worse grades, but what we can do is to see what correlations there are between positive reviews and spikes in sales. It turns out there is pretty much none. The only correlation we managed to find was with combined release of the Zero punctuation and Gamespot reviews. These were out very close in time and almost quadrupled sales compared to the previous days before (about 150/day to 600/day). It even seems like this boost still remains.

Apart from this example, it has not been possible to find any other correlations. Part of this is probably due to the noisy nature of the data; many reviews come out at the same time they overlap and it is not possible to discern individual contributions. However, when articles have been alone in time, there still have not been any noticeable spikes. One explanation is that it might be hard for people to find out where the game is bought, as our website is seldom mentioned in previews/reviews. This is especially true for the time before the pre-order became available at the major online retailers. Another explanation is that most reviews have more of a long term effect, instead of an instant sales boost. What this means is that reviews convince players that already know about the game to purchase it, instead of acting as a PR catalyst.

What reviews does do is to make other publications find out about you. Getting a review in a high-status outlet have meant mails from many other publications and convinced other media folk that the game is worth writing about. Thus, as mentioned previously, good review help sales in a long term perspective.


Pirating
Now it is time to discuss pirating and how this has affected us. First of all, it is quite easy to see that there are tons of torrents/shared files of Amnesia available. When we search the web to see if any news on Amnesia has popped up, almost 50% of the results go to a pirated version of the game. This is of course makes us sad, but it is also something one has to deal with when living in today's world. We are well aware that the same technology that allows pirating of our game, is the same that enabled us create the game in the first place. Without a fast Internet and a connected world we would never be able to work together or distribute our games. But this does not mean that we should just ignore piracy and it is important to figure out what kind of impact it has on us.

As I have said, the sales have been above what we had expected, but compared to the response we have gotten it still feels kind of low. For example, the very hyped Minecraft has gotten more than ten times the sales compared us. While being a vastly different game compared to Amnesia, there are some differences that are worth discussing. In terms of the amount of PR received, I would say that Minecraft is more well known, but Amnesia is not far behind. Google gives us two times the hits compared to them and a popular pirate site gives Minecraft double the distributors compared to us. We have gotten more reviews from popular outlets, Minecraft has gotten more viral-like PR. As I said, I think Minecraft has the upper hand here, but not by that much. Still, Minecraft has a over ten times the sales compared to Amnesia, which is a huge difference.

Our conclusion is that a large part of this is due to the lack of pirating in Minecraft compared to us. As I mentioned above, Minecraft has 10x the sales, but only 2x the torrent distributors. A Google search on the subject also turns up twice the hits for Amnesia. It seems like more people are pirating Amnesia and we think there are two main reasons for this. Both of them are related to the single-player nature of the experience.

First of all, once you have played Amnesia there is little meaning to play again. A person pirating the game and finishing it has no real reason to go back. So even if a player likes it and determines that it is well worth paying for, there is no incentive to do so. It is quite common to read on forums that people have downloaded a pirated version and say that they will probably buy it later. The question here is how many actually does this? Even if you really liked the game and want to support the developers, it basically feels like money down the drain since you get nothing extra after paying. This is not the case for a game like Minecraft where more content is released all the time and the game is designed to be highly replayable (and darn it for that, damn time consumer!).

The second reason is the lack of any proper protection. Not only does Amnesia not have any real protection from the start, there is almost no way for us to force people into buying ad-hoc. What we can do is to release patches, but this only affect people that have not been able to start the game, a small part of the user base. So once the game is out we are basically screwed and we can not do much to make people chose a legal over a pirated one. Minecraft requires a server connection and is constantly updated, effectively pushing people towards buying the legit version.

So what to do about this? One way is to create different kinds of games, where we can implement these sort of things. But that just feels wrong. A developer should not design a game based on how it can be protected and doing so can only lead to bad things for our games (to avoid feeding potential flames; this is based on what we want to do with our games, not what we think of others who might do this). What we want to continue doing is to create single player games that try to evolve the way in which videogames tell stories and evoke emotions. Another option is to expand our horizons and try other platforms. This is what we are currently looking into. We do not know what this will mean as of yet, but hopefully we can continue to expand platforms and not limit them.


Our situation
So what does all this money talk mean for Frictional Games as a company? The most positive news is that we have recouped all expenses from creating Amnesia. This is of course awesome, but it needs to be taken into account that we worked long days at a very low salary, using minimal expenses. Our next game will not be possible to do on a budget like that.

For the team, it is now finally back to more normal salaries. This still means that we are paid below, or just at, minimum wage (there is not an actual minimum specified by law, we just mean according to standards) here in Sweden though. We have made some calculations and if we were to increase salaries to normal levels, our current earnings would only last for a year and a half at most. We estimate that it will take at least two years to complete our upcoming game and there are more expenses involved than salaries for the five team members (check the credits for Amnesia!). So right now, we have to stick to having low salaries and see how sales pan out.

At the time of writing our daily sales are at around 350 units, but it fluctuates quite a bit and it is hard to see how it will be in the long term. I said in the previous post that the sales were dropping drastically, but this actually stopped a day or so after posting. Our hope is that it will end up at around 70 per day, as this means that the day-to-day sales would cover monthly salary costs. The money earned at launch could then be used for other expenses and perhaps help us reach more common wages. Very hard to say when a steady level will been reached though. For the Penumbra games it happened two weeks or so after release, but PR for Amnesia is still pouring in, so we assume at least another month.


Final thoughts
Hopefully this post has give some kind of insight into sales for a PC game and where Frictional Games stand now. We are really happy how Amnesia have turned out in all ways. While sales could have been better, people are still buying it and will hopefully continue to. If it stabilizes at a good level, things are looking very bright indeed.

We also feel that we finally can leave Amnesia behind us and start focusing on our next project instead. As this will be our first project where we know from the start that we can finance it ourselves, it will be very interesting to see what can be done. In all our previous games, we have mostly rushed through the production. This is will be the first time we can take our time and make sure that all is the way we want it to.

Exciting times lie ahead and we hope you all will follow us into the future as well!

On Game Length

Not too long ago, there was a coordinated blog effort with developers like Jonathan Blow, 2D Boy and more commenting on the length of games. The general consensus of these posts was that games should not be judged by their length, but if the experience feels complete or not. Something that we here at Frictional Games agree on.

Now that we have released Amnesia: The Dark Descent, game length has once again come into our lives. There have been several reviews of the game that have stated that the game's length, 6 - 10 hours, was a major negative. Especially considering that the game does not have any replayability (although that is up for discussion).

This has made us a bit concerned. A major goal with our games is to have no fillers, to have a game where everything is focused on creating a certain experience. Since we do not have combat in our games, there is no way to extend length in a simple way (like filling a room with enemies). Just about every minute in our games requires lots of time and effort to implement. If we are to keep on improving the quality of our games, 6 - 10 hours is pretty much the maximum amount of gameplay time we can create.

Especially now that the first week of sales, despite overwhelmingly excellent response, were only moderate (more on that here), this makes us a bit concerned. If 6 - 10 hours for a $20 game gives it a negative mark, what if we increase the price to $30, would this drastically decrease the positive response? Even more serious, this negative feedback on the game's length has made us having discussion topics like "how do we make this section longer?". We try to push this aside and instead focus on more important topics such as "how do make this section more engaging?", but it is still nagging at the back of our heads. Focusing on game length, is something I find can have very negative effect on a game's design (discussed a bit here).

With this background information, we would like to hear your thoughts on this issue! I have set up a poll in our forum here:
http://frictionalgames.com/forum/thread-4427.html
Please take your time and register and place your vote.

Also, please tell us what you think in our forum or here on the blog!

One week after the release of Amnesia

It has now been a week since we released Amnesia: The Dark Descent and I would like to go through some areas of interest. There is a a lot to say really, but I will try and be brief and only concentrate on the most important things.


Making the game available
This was the first time that we have had a game that would be simultaneously released for six different stores on the same day, so we were a bit nervous on how that would go. To make sure that all stores had enough time we sent out the game more than a week before release. This seems to have worked and all the stores had the game available in time for release.

Added to this, we also had a system for pre-order customers to get their download link, serial key and Steam key. Jens have tried this over a month before release and it was very well tested once released. The only problem was some mix up with keys and people loosing their mail, otherwise all went well.

In summary, we are quite happy how the availability of the game turned out and we actually expected there to be more unknown factors popping up and make our lives harder.


Press Response
We had already gotten a few previews and thought we had some idea where the reviews would land. However, reality turned out far beyond our expectations. There has some extremely positive response (as can be seen on the game's page and at meta critic) and we are extremely happy about this. From all the graded reviews so far, all but three have been 80+ (about half of these 90+) and interestingly two of the less positive ones had has a major complaint that there was too much horror in the game. Which in a way makes us happy as well...

We have also been able to reach out to a lot of media, and most major sites have covered the game. A bit disappointingly, a few sites that reviewed and covered the Penumbra games have not mentioned Amnesia. We assume this is because we no longer have a publisher and thus lack the proper channels. For the Penumbra games we handled very little of the marketing ourself and thus lacked email/contacts to many sites (we still tried to contact all media we could think of though).


Player response
Like reviews, response from player has gone beyond our expectations. We noticed this first at the release of the demo. We were unsure of how interesting it would be, but it was received very well. Since then, the name Amnesia has spread like wildfire across the Internets. I think there have been more videos, discussions, etc released at the time of writing than we have accumulated for any of the Penumbra games. It is also telling that the within 24 hours of release, pretty much all major secrets in the game was found out (it took much longer for the Penumbra games).


Piracy
I think the most alarming thing was that the game was available as a pirated copy 24 hours or so before release. This kind of 0-day release can be quite hurtful, as otherwise paying customers might be so anxious to play that they pirate and then forget to pay for it. Since we released the game online only, we were not expecting this and the source of the illegal copy was one of our review copies (with tracking info hacked away). We are not sure what to do about this in the future, but we will have to be more careful and perhaps not send out review copies to so many outlets. It could have gone a lot worse though as a the first review copies (of early builds) were sent out almost a month before release.


Sales
As many of you might already know Amnesia is a sort of make or break game for us. At the time of writing, we are very close to our "all is good"-goal, meaning that we are still in business (due to contractual stuff we cannot release any numbers right now)! However, there are a few "buts" to all this.

The response we got from the game is a lot better than we expected, yet the sales are only "good" according to our, much more modest, expected response. This makes us wonder what sales we would have gotten if the response would have been more like what we thought it would be. If this is our time in the spotlight, then a lot less noticed game would probably put us out of business. As it looks now, we still have to be quite careful in budgeting our next game (although much less careful than what we had to be with Amnesia). We were hoping a really successful release would makes 100% unworried about finances, but that is not what has happened.

Can we really judge sales from just one week? According to current graphs: yes we can. Even though reviews keep coming in from major outlets and we keep pushing out marketing material (videos, release of tools, etc) sales are dropping fast. Around 50% of our current earnings where made in less than a week and on pre-orders from before release. The sales where at the top during the last hour of the Steam 20% discount, and has since dropped almost exponentially, being pretty much halved each day. It will be really interesting to see at what level it pans out.

This is of course not all the income we will make from the game, but is still a bit discouraging when comparing to recent XBLA releases and similar. So why is not sales higher? Piracy? People waiting for future massive discounted sales? Game too scary / niched? Right now we have not got a clue, but hopefully it will become clearer further on.

Finally, as this was a multi-platform release, some preliminary sales distribution should be of interest. Around 90% was windows users, 5% Linux and 5% Mac. In defense of Mac and Linux we did concentrate our marketing efforts on the Windows user base.


Technical Issues
When releasing for PC, there is bound to be tons of technical problems, especially since we released for three different OS. So it is kinda surprising that it has not been that much. As with Penumbra, the number one problem has been OpenGL driver issues, something we unfortunately cannot control.

The largest single issue is probably the problems the ATI X-series and below range of cards for Windows. I'd like to add that we had tried it on a 9600 for a Mac successfully, but on Windows it fails due to various issues. In a way this is a driver issue too, but I think it might be some piece of code that it simply dislikes and I am hoping to fix it for an upcoming patch.

In general game issues, there have been less than expected too. There is the standard falling out of the map and physics messed up bugs, but less than we thought there would be. In-game crashes are also very few (most caused by some cache issues it seems), which is nice and we feel that the game is quite stable.


Game feedback
There has been a ton of feedback for the game and we try to read and discuss most of it. Discussing in detail would take up too much space so I will just take up two points, that I found extra important.

The main thing we will do for our next game is to skip any "forced" and incoherent mechanics. What I mean by this is puzzles that does not really make sense in the game world and break the immersion. An example would be the corpse-puzzle that forces the player to use very specific items to complete it. Trying to get rid of all these elements and further increase the feeling of being part of an actual world, will be one of our top priorities.

One of the main themes of the game, was for the player to slowly regain lost memories and to make up their mind about Daniel (ie their past self). While most still refer to the protagonist as "Daniel" (and not "me"), many players have really thought about the details discovered in a way we hoped. The game medium is so great for setting the audience at the center of the drama and force them to take a stance. It feels as if many people did this in Amnesia, and we hope to take this even further and on different subjects for future games.


Final thoughts
On almost all fronts, we area extremely pleased with this release. It has in many ways exceeded our expectations and it makes all the hard work, pay cuts, etc worth it in the end.

The most distressing thing is the sales though. Even though we are far from complaining, it feels like we do not have the financial security we would like to have, to truly be able to focus on making the best game possible. So what should we do? The things we have discussed include: Increase the cost of the game, doing a console port instead of Linux/Mac, do a less niche title and more. Now is too soon to make a decision though and we have to see how the coming weeks and months go.

Finally, I know I say this a lot but we truly mean it: Thanks to all who have supported us by buying the game, spreading the word, and what not. We hope you all will continue supporting us in the future as well! All of Frictional Games sends their finest regards and thanks for this support!