ALL THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF PC GAMES

News

Shovel Knight has sold 2m copies

Shovel Knight has sold 2m copies

Developer Yacht Club Games has revealed that its retro platformer Shovel Knight has sold two million copies since its 2014 release 26 months ago.

In a detailed sales breakdown, the studio shows that 24.4 per cent of total sales were on PC, with a small percentage being on Mac, on top of that. This means that over a quarter of Shovel Knight sales are on PC, most likely.

In 2014, the game sold 170,000 copies, with 140,000 units being dispatched in 2015. The following year this dropped to 100,000, before 2017 brought in 75,000. Total sales for the title have been buoyed by releases on new platforms, such as Nintendo Switch.

The bulk of sales have been in America, which accounts for 67.6 per cent of users, with Europe following with a 22. 5 per cent portion. On PC, 55.9 per cent of users were American, and 23.1 per cent from Europe.

The firm also gave an update on how the DLC campaigns, Plague of Shadows and Specter of Torment, have performed. Yacht Club has been open about the fact that the former was "not worth it" financially, spending more than $1m on development only to make a return of... nothing.

By contrast, Specter of Torment actually made back 25 per cent of its $1.5m budget, so while better than Plague of Shadows, that's not a profit for the studio.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.