Shovel Knight profit analysis

[Samus Aran]

sterner said:

I thought it was discussed long ago already. You forgot to mention that the game was heavily promoted by nintendo, generated 2/3 of revenue on nintendo platforms, so its far from typical indie. Actually worth of marketing efforts from nintendo may far exceed the official budget, so it may be like this - 720k development budget, 5kk *hidden* PR budget from nintendo, 4.5kk revenue. Also most copies are probably from sales, so lower the real revenue. Reminds me of Infinity Blade which is most profitable Epic game, with Apple doing all the PR, yeah.

I'm glad that their efforts and crunching paid-off, but Shovel Knight made me give up on indie games actually. Given the nice kickstarter, nintendo support, competent developer, and the result? Nice 16bit-era game with 8-bit graphics. I wonder if any indie dev will ever be able to make a game of original Resident Evil caliber at least.

As of 6 December there were NO SALES for this game. It sold at full price. Currently the game is 33% off, but those sales are NOT included in the 300k sales figure. 

And I doubt Nintendo spent money on marketing a third party indie game that isn't exclusive to their console. It was the developer's choice to market this game heavily on Nintendo platforms and it paid off well. Around 62% of the sales came from the Wii U + 3DS. 

You have no sources for anything you claimed.