Unigine OilRush Barely Does 800 Sales To Date

While OilRush is the first Linux game using the Unigine Engine and it features impressive graphics (a second look), the pre-orders continue to be well below Unigine Corp's expectations and certainly what we would have expected as well.

Last week I mentioned that 90% of the OilRush pre-orders were for Linux and the other 10% being Windows gamers. However, this was just on about 300 sales. I had obtained these figures when talking with Unigine Corp's CEO. As of their latest numbers, the OilRush orders remain low while Linux gamers continue controlling 90% of the sales.

This morning, Unigine Corp has made available these pre-order statistics to the public. The real-time numbers can be found on their store's statistics page.

As of right now, there's only 727 Linux pre-orders for OilRush and 81 pre-orders for Windows. This puts the count at just above 800 sales since pre-orders were made available last week. Pre-ordering the game allows you access to beta versions of this real-time strategy game while it will be released as stable in June.

When taking out commissions, just over 800 orders on this $19.95 USD game yields less than $14,000 in revenue for this game. According to my conversations with Unigine Corp, "several hundreds of thousands dollars" have already been spent in this game's development.

The stats page also shows that gamers within the United States are driving the sales at 143 of the 808 pre-orders. Trailing the US is Germany at 123, France at 68, Russia at 64, and Great Britain at 62. The remaining 348 sales come from throughout the world.

In talking with Unigine Corp this morning, I've also found out they are now working on a Mac OS X version of the Unigine Engine and there will be a native OS X client for OilRush too. This advanced engine is already compatible with Windows, Linux, PlayStation 3, and Android, so it shouldn't be a huge task porting it to Mac OS X with its OpenGL renderer. I've heard the port may even be done this month, but it could also be a question of how well the AMD/NVIDIA Mac OS X drivers can handle this very demanding 3D engine. At least the Apple drivers are getting beaten into shape thanks to Steam and the Source Engine, but there isn't much change with the Mac OS X 10.7 benchmarks from the first developer preview.

Whether any of Unigine's tech demos / benchmarks will be released for Mac OS X is still being decided.