Shovel Knight sold 180,000 copies in its first month
Yacht Club Games shared a comprehensive breakdown of Shovel Knight’s sales in a new blog post.
In its first week, the indie title managed to sell 75,000 copies (taking out Kickstarter pre-sales). Yacht Club said, “It blew our 2x-4x pre-sale expectation out of the water”.
There are a few reasons we think our preorder prediction ended up being such a conservative estimate. One is…we were a Kickstarter! That’s not quite the same thing as a preorder. People could only attain the preorder for a limited time, so the stats aren’t 100% aligned with what a preorder would do. We think due to the PC nature of Kickstarter, we saw a higher amount of sales on Nintendo’s platform when the game actually got released. Nintendo users are more inclined to buy the game day one rather than through a preorder on Kickstarter. Finally, the preorder prediction isn’t a set in stone statistic, but more like a guideline for what to expect. We had done a lot of promotion and marketing at conventions and on media sites to prove ourselves over the course of the year, and we think people responded to it in kind! Nintendo also did an amazing job supporting us through their store placement and own marketing channels.
Yacht Club also revealed that Shovel Knight’s first month sales stand at 180,000 copies including review copies and Kickstarter copies. Wii U accounts for 27 percent of this figure while 3DS makes up 33 percent.
Overall, we’re extremely happy with the sales! We don’t have sales data on many other digital games to offer a comparison, but we do know it’s doing very well for our company – meaning the six of us! This means we can keep our current course and continue making the stretch goal content without fear of disbanding or seeking additional funding. It means we can continue living our dreams producing awesome games for our incredible fans (and soon-to-be fans)! And we still have lots of markets to release the game in – Australia, Europe, Japan…although those markets are typically less when compared to America, they will definitely help contribute to our next efforts. The steady supply of free stretch goal content updates should also provide a nice boost in sales once each is released.
You can find much more on Shovel Knight’s sales over on Yacht Club Games’ blog.
