Shovel Knight has sold 1.2 million copies, 1 million sold digitally (Details inside)

[Barozi]

Nautilus said:

Barozi said:

It's pretty common for known indie games and Shovel Knight is one of them. Took them far longer than expected to reach that number. Far worse games have reached a million much quicker. Nowadays and already 3 years ago. So, yeah it's a bit sad it's only at 1.2m as of now. Remember that it's on pretty much every platform there is. Also there's only one DLC as of now and that one is free.

I'm not saying that it should compete with Rocket League or Minecraft, but it's certainly a better game than many dozen indie games that sold more.

As far as im aware, its not common.Just because 3 or 4 indies reached that mark last year(im guessing numbers here, I dont remember which games reached that milestone) dosent make that common.Common would be if 40% or higher of every indie released reached those sales.Plus this is the first game from Yatch Club, so th game didnt have any prior hype(read:developer pedigree) behind it.Minecraft and Rocket League are annomalities, even for AAA standard.And you need to remember that it released first on PC and Nintendo systems, then went to Sony and Microsoft.

And I mean, its 1.2 million for gods sake!They used  roughly 311k to developed it, and they are making dozens of millions in profits.How can that be sad in any way?People are unrealistic in expectations.If the industry needed millions upon millions of sales for any game to be considered a success, it would have crashed by now.

dozens of millions? Where are you getting those numbers from?
The game is $15. At 1m digital sales that's $15m plus 200k retail at $30 ($6m). $21m in total of which both the platform holder and the retailer is getting a big share.

It's common for popular and/or great indie games. Obviously not for all indie games. But take a look at Steam Spy and see how many indie games since the release of Shovel Knight sold more than a million. Then remember that these are only PC sales.