Amnesia: The Dark Descent

A month after the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Frictional Games have released another Overview on their blog regarding it's sales, which have been better than expected.

QuoteThe 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.

QuoteGathering 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.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.