Excuse the weird phrasing there, but as Frictional Games writes in its latest report on Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the number of units sold for a digitally distributed game is "actually really hard to pin down."
Excluding the Humble Indie Bundle and Potato Bundle, both of which Amnesia was a part of, there have been 710,000 units sold. With those bundles, that figure jumps up to 1,360,000 units. "A slightly pessimistic guess (not far from reality I think) is that 2/3 of every bundle and pack buyer already owned Amnesia. This gives us about 920,000 units in total, pessimistically speaking. So saying that we have sold a million units seems fair. Wait... a million units! Oh shit!!"
Not bad for a game that took $360,000 and three years to develop. Frictional attributes much of this continued success to the modding scene and, in turn, YouTube clips. People like watching other people get scared, it seems.
At the bottom of the post, there's also a tease for the first-person horror game that will follow Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Expected for release in 2014, this unnamed project will try to [create] horror in a much more disturbing way." I don't know if I can handle that.
Amnesia sales surpass a million, dev working on new horror game [Joystiq]
Contest:
8:00 PM on 09.10.2012 | 
But seriously, awesome to see this game did well. I haven't been so scared playing a video game since Silent Hill 3.
Wait wait wait. Machine for pigs is in '14 now?! I thought it was out this year! WHAT HAS HAPPENED?!!?!?!?
Anyway, best of luck to them, I love the series.
The blog post says 2013.
And then all was fine on the prairie.
"At Frictional Games our main concern is our new super secret project. We do not want to say much about this project yet,but we can disclose that it will be horror and that it will be first person."
Their working on another game XD.
At the bottom of the post, there's also a teaser for the first-person horror game that will follow Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Expected for release in 2014, this project will try to [create] horror in a much more disturbing way." I don't know if I can handle that.
Lies.
It really depends on what you want your numbers to mean. If you just want to post high numbers, then you count whatever you can, like counting pack-ins or units shipped.
If you want some measure of fairness, then you at least put an asterisk besides debatable sales, like pack-ins and bundles. A lot of copies of Wii Sports were moved, but how popular would it have been if it wasn't a free pack-in? This gets even weirder when you have a game that is both sold separately and given away or repackaged. I believe Dragon Warrior was both sold and later given away as a Nintendo Power bonus? Super Mario Bros was given away, repackaged in multi-game cart form, and later both remade and ported on other systems.
If you want an idea of how many people own the game, then you want to try to account for and remove duplicate copies. Bundles are particularly bad in this regard, as you can get so many (often 5-10) games in a single package, and there is generally neither indication of which of those games a buyer really wanted nor how many copies of the same game that person had previously bought. You cannot even always count unique registrations, as some bundles give you a game across multiple systems (PC, Linux, iOS, etc), across multiple store services (Steam keys, Desura keys, in addition to straight no-DRM downloads), and some give a single key for every game while others give a separate key for each game (which allows people to give away games that they don't want,) or even a combination of the two.
It's TWO games. A machine for pigs in 2013 and a NEW, yet UNNAMED game in 2014.
Which is pretty good news btw.
fit for the slaughtering of pigs