14 DAY TRIAL // Shovel Knight has only been out for a month, and developer Yacht Club Games, taking advantage of its independent status, has revealed that the game has already sold 180k units across PC, 3DS and Wii U.
The game completely exceeded the small team's expectations, and it seems that all their hard work has not been in vain, as they report that the title has already moved 180k units, and that's not counting Kickstarter pre-sales.
Shovel Knight is currently available for PC and the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U platforms, and it seemingly goes against all that is holy in the land of Mario, by proving that indie games can also be successful on the big N's devices.
The sales were pretty evenly spread out, with the Steam version leading the charge with 37 percent of the pie, followed by the 3DS with 33 percent and the Wii U with 27, with an estimated 3 percent of additional sales coming from GOG and Humble Bundle.
Multiplying the number of sales by the game's price, we end up with an impressive $2.7 / €2 million in sales revenue, which is a pretty big haul for such a small team. Of course, Nintendo's marketing efforts helped boost the sales on its platforms considerably.
Shovel Knight started out as a successful Kickstarter project in March last year, and now that it's out and it did good, the guys at Yacht Club Games have decided to give fellow indie developers a breakdown of the title's earnings and a bit of insight into the development process, outlining the cost of development and their expectations and comparing it with real-world data.
Although the game is now a huge success compared to what they were expecting, as well as compared to the usual prediction that any game will sell 2 to 4 times more than its Kickstarter pre-sales at launch, the road there was rocky, to put it mildly.
The developers were running late, as the development took longer than the initial estimation of 12 month, and by March of 2014 they ran out of money and had to get by on loans and convert to breatharianism in order to get by.
However, after five grueling months and extensive self-promotion efforts, the game went on to rank among the first on both Nintendo platforms, as well as to spend some quality time with Steam's best sellers.
"For all of you who had doubts that a Wii U game or a digital game on a Nintendo platform could sell, we hope these facts show that a good game on any system, marketed the right way, can sell," the developers state in the sales breakdown post.
Shovel Knight is available for PC, Wii U and 3DS, and will also be arriving on Mac and Linux at a later date.
