Frictional dissects Dark Descent figures, announces console future

Frictional Games has said it sold a little over 391,102 copies of its survival horror game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and 75 percent of sales for the game were accrued through discounted offers.

According to a post on the developer's official website, during GDC Europe, it was noted that the game had sold above 400,000 units total, but when recrunching the numbers, the studio found it was closer to the 391,102 unit mark. Of those copies, 300,000 were sold at a discounted rate, and over half of the remaining 100,000 or so were sold at launch at full price.

The developer also noted that the game sells around 6,000 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," said studio head Thomas Grip. "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.

"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.

Friction said its next project will not be "as horror focused" as the ones it has done in the past, but will "still have a scary atmosphere."

"Our intention this time is to dig into deeper and more intellectually demanding subjects," said Grip. "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."

Thanks: Blues News, GameInformer.