The interesting thing about Shovel Knight is that the game's developers have been very open on the development process of this game.
Yacht Club Games posted the following image on their blog:
They explain that the average cost of an employee to a company is estimated to be $10.000 per month. For Yacht Club Games this cost was actually halfed, so one person only costed the company $5000.
"The man month total number can vary widely for games, but for Shovel Knight, we figured it was something around 144 man months to finish the game."
Yacht Club Games consists out of 6 people. 144/6 = 24 months, i.e. Shovel Knight had a development cycle of 2 years. Now how much did Shovel Knight cost to develop? This is a simple calculation:
5000 * 144 = 720.000
So the game had a development budget of $720.000. As most of you probably know, Shovel Knight was a kickstarter project. They managed to collect $311.502. That still leaves $408.498 unaccounted for.
Now how much did Shovel Knight actually sell?
Yacht Club Games announced on 6 December that the game sold over 300k copies across platforms.
Around 15k people backed this on Kickstarter:
15.000 * 20 = 300.000
These people got a "free" copy of the game.
That means at least 285k people bought the game since 6 December:
285.000 * 15 = 4.275.000
4.275.000 + 300.000 = 4.575.000
4.575.000 - 408.498 = 4.166.502
But of course Yacht Club Games has to pay royalties to Nintendo and Valve. According to this source the royalties on the Eshop are similar to the Appstores. According to this source the royalties are around 30% of the generated revenue on Appstores. So I will be using the 30% figure in this analysis. Yacht Club Games had to pay around $1.249.950 of royalties to Valve and Nintendo. So the profit is actually $2.916.552.
So each developer earned $20.253 per month during the 2 year development cycle (not including monthly paychecks).
Of course, Yacht Club Games is currently working on free dlc, which means the actual development cycle will be longer than 2 years, but the game will continue to sell during that development process. So they shouldn't run into any budget problems for 2015. The game has yet to be released on PS3, PS4 and PSVITA and it will include exclusive content in the form of a Kratos boss battle. So there will be a nice incentive to buy it on a PS platform. Also keep in mind that this analysis doesn't include a whole month of sales data. We don't know how much the game has sold currently. We only know that it sold over 300.000 copies since 6 December.
So the conclusion is that Yacht Club Games have earned a very nice profit and they made the right decision on becoming independent developers.
Sources used:
http://yachtclubgames.com/2014/08/sales-one-month/
http://www.develop-online.net/news/steam-dev-revenue-split-flexible-but-fair/0109256
Please read the this blog if you are confused about some of the numbers used in this thread. They explain it more in depth there.
