Yacht Club Talks Shovel Knight Sales and Costs

Developer Yacht Club Games has confirmed sales and costs for developing Shovel Knight.

The critically acclaimed 2D, retro-inspired platformer is now available on 3DS, Wii U and PC, and has already topped 180,000 units sold in its first month on sale.

Originally funded on Kickstarter, the campaign originally had 15% looking for a Wii U version, 21% for 3DS and the remaining 64% opting for the PC edition.

With the total funding, including Paypal donations, reaching $328,628, the figure soon shrunk with a team of six people, working with no salary for five months. The budget looked around $10,000 per person, six in total, working for 24 months. Costs included salary, admin expenses, insurance and more.

The only thing left to do is cut the amount allocated for each person by half. So now we're running on $5k man months - which is extremely low. At first, that sounds like $60k per year, but with the company costs, taxes, etc, in reality, it's more like $30k for each of us over the course of the year... and that's before any taxes.

With the game now out on the market, Shovel Knight sold over 75,000 in its first week on the market, with a near-even split between formats. 27% purchased the Wii U edition, 35% Nintendo 3DS and the remaining 38% opted for PC.

The team are now looking to sell 1 million units in the game's lifetime.

For more details, visit the Shovel Knight blog.

Have you dug with Shovel Knight yet?