Comment on Creator of Hit Game Shovel Knight Is at a ‘Make or Break’ Moment
Aielman15@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Shovel Knight is one of the most successful indie games ever released. We’re not talking of a “moderately” successful game that sold a few hundred thousand copies, like Hyper Lighr Drifter or CrossCode: SK sold over 2.5m copies back in 2019, and I’d wager at least as much since then. How do you go from there to almost bankruptcy?
Paying a bunch of salaries when your revenue streams are Shovel Knight (good but old game that kept getting free DLC and made a lot of its money before release) and… Shovel Knight Dig. They had to go back to Kickstarter for Mina, after all.
If it was one guy or a tiny team, SK’s success would be enough for them to be “set for life”, but a business is more expensive to run than a team is.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They did a lot of extra work on it without charging for it, and it’s been a long time since they put out a hit. California salaries and real estate are expensive.