Yacht Club Games has shared sales information for its latest titles Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon and Cyber Shadow. Despite relatively slow initial sales, Yacht Club says it's looking to add "huge features" to Pocket Dungeon in the coming weeks and months.
What do these Yacht Club Games sales figures tell us?
Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon launched late last year, and we rather liked it. Despite its quality, however, it doesn't seem to have found a wide audience; in its most recent sales breakdown, Yacht Club Games says Pocket Dungeon sold a little over 35,000 units within its first two months on release. The studio says the revenue from these sales covers its expenses with co-developer Vine, but doesn't cover its own internal costs. These numbers didn't come as a big surprise to Yacht Club, though; the studio knew it was experimenting with new genres in a "wacky spinoff" that might be a big ask for Shovel Knight fans.
Yacht Club says it's still committed to Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, though, and is focused on introducing three major new DLC packs with new features soon. These will include online multiplayer, Steam mod support, and "more more more of everything", so if you do love Pocket Dungeon, there's more to come. The studio also shares some other interesting Pocket Dungeon metrics; the vast majority of the game's players are on Switch, for example, and are located in the United States. The studio also says that there's a big discrepancy between median and average playtime, suggesting that those who do play Pocket Dungeon love it, but that others bounce off the game quite hard. It's well worth reading the full breakdown for Yacht Club's take on these figures.
How has Cyber Shadow performed?
As well as Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, Yacht Club also shares some statistics on Cyber Shadow, a Ninja Gaiden-inspired platformer developed by one-man studio MekaSkull (and, again, a game we quite liked). Over its first year, Cyber Shadow has sold around 85,000 units, but it's also important to note it was released on Xbox Game Pass on day one. Yacht Club estimates that around 300,000 players enjoyed the game this way. Overall, Yacht Club says it managed to more than recoup its costs on Cyber Shadow; the game's $1.2 million revenue covered the original $600,000 budget and then some.
Looking to the future, Yacht Club says it's still waiting for the Shovel Knight Treasure Trove pack (which contains all four major Shovel Knight campaigns) to cross the 3 million sales mark. In addition, the studio is also currently working on its Game Boy homage Mina the Hollower, which smashed its Kickstarter funding goal on its first day. The studio says this success allows it to "worry a little less about the money" and focus more on making the game, so hopefully, Mina the Hollower will turn out to be as great as its initial trailer makes it look. Stay tuned for more.
