Yacht Club Games financials and Shovel Knight sales and budget breakdown

[DarkDetective]

https://www.yachtclubgames.com/blog/sales-breakdown-a-couple-pocket-months-later

Yacht Club Games company financials (lifetime revenue)

All of our games sales (after sales tax, partners and platform holders cut, etc) have generated Yacht Club Games more than 40 million dollars in revenue!!! That’s completely staggering to us. It’s allowed us to grow to a studio that’s now 25 strong, making 2 games at once!

Let’s not let the transparency end there! If you’re wondering how it breaks down (with some quick napkin math)...what ends up in Yacht Club’s accounts is about $24M due to taxes. We spent around $9M making Shovel Knight and more than $2M on external games. Which gives us around $13M for the next two games.

Shovel Knight Treasure Trove budget

Shovel Knight was originally released in June 2014. Back then, Yacht Club Games had decided to launch the Kickstarter stretch goal expansions as separate games. To do this, they upgraded all Shovel Knight players to owners of "Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove", which includes access to all Shovel Knight games. Purchases after that move would not include the later games. The original release was renamed Shovel Knight: Shovel of Hope.

+--------------------+------------+-----------+------------+
|        Game        |  Dev time  | Team size |   Budget   |
+--------------------+------------+-----------+------------+
| Shovel of Hope     |  18 months |  6 people | $1.400.000 |
| Plague of Shadows  |  12 months |  9 people | $1.000.000 |
| Specter of Torment |  15 months | 16 people | $1.500.000 |
| King of Cards      |  18 months | 16 people | $2.500.000 |
| Showdown           |  12 months | 16 people | $1.500.000 |
+--------------------+------------+-----------+------------+
| Treasure Trove     | 110 months | 16 people | $9.000.000 |
+--------------------+------------+-----------+------------+

Treasure Trove budget includes ancillary products, such as quality of life updates, amiibo support, co-op play, body swap, cheat codes, challenge mode, porting, additional localisation, etc.

Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon

Budget: $300.000 for 6 people working for 24 months

We sold just over 35,000 units across all platforms in the two months since release. Our first week sales were just under 20,000 units, and our first month sales were just over 30,000. You might be thinking…hey that’s not a lot compared to Shovel Knight! You’d be right. Compared to Shovel Knight’s sales of 180k in the first month, Pocket Dungeon definitely is hitting a much smaller audience. The revenue from those sales covers our expenses with Vine, but don’t cover our internal costs.

Spoiler: Breakdowns by platform and region

Imgur backup

Images in the spoiler.

Cyber Shadow

The Power of Game Pass?

Cyber Shadow released January 26th, 2021, so we’ve just passed our first year of sales. Our announcement trailer for the game had 336k views on YouTube. That’s about a third of the highest Shovel Knight video viewed before release, so our best hope for Cyber Shadow was that it would appeal to about a third of Shovel Knight’s audience. Aarne worked on the game by himself for 7 years and then 3 more years with us….so we wanted to make sure we delivered on our end of the bargain!

Total we’ve sold around 85,000 units across all platforms. It’s important to note here that Cyber Shadow was a day 1 Xbox Game Pass game, which according to our estimates means more than 300,000 players got the game for free on Game Pass. So almost half a million people have taken a swipe at Cyber Shadow, which makes us truly happy!

55,000 units were sold in the first month, and 44,000 units were in the first week! This is fascinating compared to Shovel Knight’s 180,000 first month and 75,000 first week. You can see Cyber Shadow had a big fall off where Shovel Knight’s sales decreased less over time. Pocket Dungeon had a similar effect- it seems we’ve amassed a small core audience that jumps in right away, but with both these new products, we’re not doing enough to maintain that interest after the initial release.

We generated about $1.2 million in revenue outside of the Game Pass deal, which more than covers our costs. Our combined budget with Aarne was about 600k (not including what Aarne would have paid himself for those 7 years!)…yayyy we didn’t lose money (given how many games we’ve released for free, that isn’t common haha!). With the Game Pass deal, Aarne was able to see a good sized check for his efforts…we were really happy to see his dreams made reality.

Spoiler: Breakdowns by platform and region

Imgur backup

Images in the spoiler.

 

[ktpoison]

Yacht Club Games shares sales breakdown for Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon and Cyber Shadow

https://www.yachtclubgames.com/blog/sales-breakdown-a-couple-pocket-months-later?fbclid=IwAR3irirD5RyYkJ-s2CuGzDiVuhikQmaivNzQ8R-4ufzcOVBvOXZhZztySts Hey there data aficionados. Can you believe we released 2 games last year? Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon has been on sale for more than two months...

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