![]() 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). If this is our time in the spotlight, then a lot less noticed game would probably put us out of business. This makes us wonder what sales we would have gotten if the response would have been more like what we thought it would be. 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. 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. 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.Īs many of you might already know Amnesia is a sort of make or break game for us. 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. 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). 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. I think the most alarming thing was that the game was available as a pirated copy 24 hours or so before release. 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). 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. Since then, the name Amnesia has spread like wildfire across the Internets. We were unsure of how interesting it would be, but it was received very well. We noticed this first at the release of the demo. Like reviews, response from player has gone beyond our expectations. 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). We assume this is because we no longer have a publisher and thus lack the proper channels. A bit disappointingly, a few sites that reviewed and covered the Penumbra games have not mentioned Amnesia. We have also been able to reach out to a lot of media, and most major sites have covered the game. 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. 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. However, reality turned out far beyond our expectations. We had already gotten a few previews and thought we had some idea where the reviews would land. 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. The only problem was some mix up with keys and people loosing their mail, otherwise all went well. Jens have tried this over a month before release and it was very well tested once released. ![]() This seems to have worked and all the stores had the game available in time for release.Īdded to this, we also had a system for pre-order customers to get their download link, serial key and Steam key. To make sure that all stores had enough time we sent out the game more than a week before release. 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. There is a a lot to say really, but I will try and be brief and only concentrate on the most important things. ![]() It has now been a week since we released Amnesia: The Dark Descent and I would like to go through some areas of interest.
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