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Amnesia: The Dark Descent tots up 1 million sales

Amnesia: The Dark Descent continues to sell over 10,000 copies a month, Frictional Games has revealed.

Because a large proportion of Amnesia's sales came as part of a Humble Indie Bundle deal, Frictional has to guesstimate how many copies were actually purchased and used, as opposed to nabbed in the bundle but ignored, as the purchaser already owned the game. In a post-mortem blog post, the developer puts its most conservative estimate at 920,000 units sold and its optimistic guess at 1.4 million, so is settling for a comfortable middle point of 1 million.

"What I think is more interesting is how good the monthly sales still are. Not counting any discounts, the monthly full price sales lie at over 10,000 units. This means that less then every fifth minute someone in the world is buying a copy of Amnesia," Fricitonal's Thomas Grip wrote.

"The fact is that Amnesia is still going very strong and 2012 will probably be the best financial year here at Frictional Games."

The indie horror title has been more than profitable for the Swedish team.

"The (exactly) three years of development cost a total of 360,000 US dollars. It has since earned more than ten times that. Take that investors we talked to in 2009!" Grip said.

Releasing its game DRM free in the Humble Indie Bundle, and being PC exclusive, suggests Frictional ought to have plenty to say on the topic of piracy. It doesn't.

"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," Grip said.

Grip attributes some of the game's success to the vocal modding community, and hopes to improve Frictional's support for modders moving forward. Speaking of moving forward, Grip made mention of Fricitonal's new project - a "super secret" first person horror with deeper themes than Amnesia, expected in 2014. In the meantime, dear Esther developer thechineseroom is working on a sequel to The Dark Descent, called A Machine for Pigs, due in 2013.

Thanks, GameInformer.

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Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

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Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.

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