Barozi said:
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. |
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.
