Amnesia a good memory for Frictional

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loSzpvq73FY&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I love indies, especially indies who put out super high quality, retail type experiences, but I can’t play horror games. This has made me something of a cheerleader for Frictional Games, whose Amnesia: The Dark Descent was, by many accounts, one of the best games released last year that I absolutely couldn’t play. This hasn’t stopped me from encouraging others to buy it, and enjoying fantastic videos like the one above. To quote one of my friends, who deals with horror so I don’t have to, Frictional make “the only genuinely frightening games available.” Trust him, he is a doctor, and has seen pretty much every horror film in the world. They make good games, those guys. I bet they’re even good guys.

So it does my heart good when I read things like this, which says that Amnesia has sold over 200,000 copies. While that doesn’t seem like a major success compared to console blockbusters, it’s quite a bit, as their blog post explains. Without a publisher collecting on an advance and then taking 75% of royalties from each sale, a developer can succeed quite comfortably selling 200K units, especially with a small team (whereas, if a game that required 50 people and had a publisher sold that many, they’d be up shit creek without a paddle).

No word on what sort of terrible horror that I will never, ever play they will release on the world, but I bet it’ll be a good one. And guys, one day, make something that won’t scare the pants off of me, so I can play your brilliant games. Thanks.