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**jens** · 07-20-2009 03:29 PM

This year began pretty well for us, things were looking good and the future of 2009, 2010 was planned. Then due to the normal unfortunate events in this unstable business we found ourselves in quite a pickle.

We have had our fair share of pickles during the years we have been running Frictional Games, as some might remember, our very first publisher didn't really feel like paying us properly for the first game we did in the Penumbra series. We have always managed to find some solution to go on and make things work, for this year's pickle we did our best but things didn't look too good...

Then there was the Steam sale of the Penumbra Collection during the early weekend in June. The future all of the sudden looked a lot brighter for us, a possibility to continue the work on the next game "Unknown" presented itself, it wasn't a 100% final vision of how to do it but it was definitely "vision-able".

Then this weekend came...

We had planned for a re-release of the Mac & Linux versions of Penumbra as a Collection. We sent out a PR and made some noise during the week to make sure it was known the Collection would sell for USD 5 during the weekend. We also came in contact with Helios - the Linux blogger with a big heart for many things. He wanted to do a write-up on the Linux version and got all excited about making it fit with the weekend deal and, oh my, did he make it fit!

Due to the blog, the Slashdot article about the blog, Linux and Mac sites posting of the PR we ended up with an excellent weekend of chaos. Because of this we are now as good as set to focus completely on making the next game, which is great compared to spending most of the day working on survival solutions.

In short, a tremendous Thank You! To everyone for this weeks coverage and to all users that gave us their support by purchasing the game during the weekend deals on Steam and the past few days. It has really turned things around for us.

Best of regards,
Frictional Games

Ps. Read our blog to keep track of our progress with Unknown!

**WindexGlow** · 07-20-2009 04:29 PM

LOL, I keep thinking you guys were going to say you're disbanding. Tongue

**Pregnant Orc** · 07-20-2009 07:35 PM

When this popped up in my inbox in its email format I was reluctant to click it as my mail client doesn't display adresses. So something coming from "admin" was about to get thrown out. Not to good as a name to show us who forgot to show adresses or who don't like to see them.

Glad I decided to check anywat.

**Klayman** · 07-20-2009 08:23 PM

I wanted to say the same thing as Pregnant Orc said. Please don't send us (subscribers) letters as "admins". I am receiving e mails from "Admin" almost every day.

I hope that you don't get to big trouble again! I wish you a lot of luck!

**tekmate** · 07-21-2009 01:01 AM

I just want to say thank you to you guys for making and releasing the games this weekend.

**nihilpenumbra** · 07-21-2009 09:09 AM

I'm really happy to hear this weekend has been a good one for you Smile

Your game really deserved it, and also all the efforts it took (from everyone working on it) to make it happen.
Great atmosphere, great porting, great script / voice acting, good puzzles...

Also, the weekend deal was a bargain, and I actually bought 4 copies, 1 linux for me, 2 mac and 1 windows for my friends.

Hope the future will be bright for you and Frictional Smile

Keep up the good work!

Alessio

**bricktop** · 07-21-2009 10:48 AM

I also was hunting for the windows version this weekend. I didn't want to sign up for GamersGate so i ended up buying the windows version from Steam for 19.99. I can honestly say that i don't regret one dollar of it. BTW Steam has just started a new weekend deal (ending on 26th July), it includes The Penumbra Collection for $9.99. Great game guys!

**urandom** · 07-22-2009 04:58 PM

is it possible to get some statistics on the distribution of sales between the windows, linux and mac ports? just out of curiosity

**bugmenot** · 07-23-2009 12:19 AM

Yes, we need the complete statistics to report them to our readers. We also need the statistics to be broken between win/lin/mac ports along with different online merchants, if possible. Please do post them, along with weekend's gross income, if possible. These are of course insider information, but if you can make it public, perhaps you will get all the more noticed. In general, give us as much detail as we can bear.

ITnews.sk

**jens** · 07-23-2009 09:14 AM

We don't have any statistics to give, but can say the same we did to helios.

That we have been running our own online store since Mars 2007, during this month we sold almost as many copies of the game as we have done in total during Mars 2007 to June 2009. Note that we have not sold that many copies to begin with, so we are not talking about 10's of thousands sold games.

Since the windows version is sold at so many places and also as a boxed version(s), there is no exact figures really. But some sort of estimate would be that Windows is 90% of the units and linux 6% with the mac at 4%.

Actually, we might turn this in to a blog post and have some greater details in it and discussions about how/why things are the way the are.

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