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Yacht Club Games’ Kickstarter-funded Shovel Knight has sold 180,000 copies across Wii U, 3DS and Steam during its first month on sale.
However, reaching this point wasn’t easy. Despite being backed to the tune of $311,502 on Kickstarter and a further $17,180 on PayPal, the developer had to seriously cut development costs in order to make the game a reality.
In an ideal world the game’s budget for a two year development would have been $1.4 million, but this was more than four times the funds available. By shrinking the dev cycle to just one year and taking home less than $30K per dev (on 12-18 hours days, seven days a week), it become possible. Even then the team had to work unpaid for the final five months.
Thankfully things have worked out.
“After the Kickstarter project ended, we all discussed our sales goals. The number that most of us settled upon was…when all was said and done, 150,000 copies sold in total. That was our high point!” explained the dev’s blog post.
“So thank you, everyone, who supported us and made it possible for Shovel Knight to surpass that in just the first month. We are blown away!”
A European release on Nintendo platforms is still in progress.
Source: Yacht Club Games
