Barozi said:
Mar1217 said:
Shovel Knight selling over 2M (Last time we heard) isn't big enough for this market ? (That's not counting the stand-alone campaign DLC) Sure, it ain't at the level of Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight or Undertale but it is still viewed as one of the most prolific stories in the indie market.
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Considering all the hype, the 10+ platforms that it was released on and the 5 years of sales, 2.5m (which is the most recent number) isn't that impressive. Definitely good and better than the average indie game, but not among the top sellers. I could name a dozen that sold more just out the top of my head and there are probably a lot more, especially when looking through the Steam library where I'm not that familiar with.
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I doubt you find many indies at that level. Really, indies live off of a few 10K. And that was actually what Yacht Club Games was expecting for Shovel Knight:
But what isn’t obvious is that we knew that Shovel Knight would be a success. [...] What concrete numbers do we speak of? We’re talking the 15,684 people that supported us during the Kickstarter campaign. Other developers have estimated that preorders predict first-week sales by 200-400%. That means Shovel Knight was guaranteed to sell 2-4 times the 15,684 backers in the first week, or in other words, 30k-60k copies in the first week. That of course seemed crazy to us…as successful games in our portfolio barely broke 50k copies sold.
https://yachtclubgames.com/2014/08/sales-one-month/
So they saw 30K-60K as a guaranteed success for the game. So, with two million they sold actually 40 times the amount they considered a success. And notice that they said there portfolio barely broke 50K copies. That is true for most indies that hadn't a breakout success.
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