Three of the most influential games from my childhood were Pokémon HeartGold, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Outlast. Knowing this, you could probably piece together the kind of person I have become—let's just say it explains a lot. So it brought a smile to my face when I learned that without one of these influential games, I wouldn't have had the other—no, Pokémon HeartGold has nothing to do with anything—it's actually Amnesia which helped bring Outlast to the world.
Red Barrels, the Outlast devs, already discussed how difficult it was to pitch Outlast to publishers in an interview with GameSpot. But they also mentioned how Amnesia: The Dark Descent was something of a lodestar for the team.
Not only did the success of Amnesia reassure Red Barrels that there was in fact a market for the kind of game they were trying to make, but the fact that no one else had really tried to ride its coattails meant there was a space left wide open for them.
Some of the Red Barrels devs even sat in on a conference talk where Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip revealed that Amnesia: The Dark Descent sold an impressive 400,000 copies in its first year. This quickly became Outlast's goalpost.
But when sales for Outlast began to die down, Red Barrels co-founder Morin decided to reach out to Grip for some advice in how to navigate the changing tides of Steam: “He explained to us the dynamic of Steam, and when you do promotion, it spikes back up, [then] goes back down, and basically your sales curve becomes like a roller coaster.”
Everything worked out in the end thankfully. With Outlast going on to meet its initial target and earning enough money to pay the team "pretty significant bonuses". The Outlast series would eventually smash that target, selling millions of copies with its Whistleblower DLC, sequel, and multiplayer game all proving successful in their own right.
