Shovel Knight - from planning and Kickstarter to bestseller on PC and Nintendo
For more than a month, Shovel Knight has been sold on Wii U / 3DS in the US and around the world on Steam (English version only)! It is very unusual to see our matured Kickstarter chick in the wild. Believe it or not, one of the reasons we abandoned our reliable jobs and went into the indie world was to make the development process more accessible to the public — so that you can better understand how games are made and how their success is measured. Today we will do it!
Unfortunately, most developers either cannot or do not want to disclose data on projected and actual sales volumes! Fortunately, we are not the majority of developers. Hopefully we can add something to the not very large amount of information available and help other developers, journalists and enthusiasts. Without you there would be no games at all, so we feel obliged to tell you about all the details of their creation. If you know any other developers doing the same thing, be sure to write about them in the comments to help others search.
Okay, let's go! We will go all the way from dream through Kickstarter to release, sharing with you information about our sales and some other statistics for the period from June 26 to July 26. Remember that none of the published figures can not be called absolutely accurate, because for various reasons, such accuracy is extremely difficult to achieve. We tried our best!
')
To understand the meaning of our current sales, you need to know how it all began! On April 13, 2013, we ended our campaign on Kickstarter, during which our beloved 14,749 sponsors raised $ 311,502. At the same time, we collected donations through PayPal, where 935 sponsors raised $ 17,180. After the campaign ended, we asked all the sponsors on which platform they would like to see the game ... and here are the results!
To our surprise, Nintendo sponsors provided only a third of the total support. We expected much more from them, especially considering how much our campaign was focused (or so it seemed to us?) On Nintendo platforms. Were skeptics right, were indie games really bad on Nintendo? We will return to this issue later, when we talk about total sales, but we can probably say that in those days Kickstarter was still a PC-oriented platform.
As a result, we started the development of Shovel Knight with $ 328,682 for the entire development period (do not forget that in these 328 thousand, taxes, the share of Kickstarter itself, commission fees, withdrawn payment sponsors and the like) are not yet taken into account. By itself, the amount is certainly rather big, but not very big, if we are talking about game development!
This may sound unexpected, but the development of even a small downloadable game can cost more than a million dollars! Our plans required the full employment of five people (six, given Jake) for two years (including the year to develop the game and the year to create the content provided for by the additional goals of the Kickstarter). Such a game is simply impossible to make for 328 thousand dollars! Let's see why:
What usually makes up the cost of the game? How do you even define it? To be honest, it is quite difficult to do, but the standard approach comes down to determining the number of developers and multiplying their cost by the development time. This is not the most accurate way, since in the game development world we usually criminally underestimate the time and effort needed to create each component. Usually this is offset by some exaggeration of time / salary / quantity in the formula.
Let's do it for Shovel Knight! Nowadays, in most studios, the average cost of a developer is 10 thousand dollars per person per month. What does it mean? In fact, each developer will cost the company 10 thousand dollars a month or 120 thousand dollars a year. It does not at all mean that each developer will receive so much per month, on the contrary, most likely none of the developers will receive so much.
The thing is that these monthly 10 thousand dollars include not only a trivial salary, but also a lot of other expenses. They include all the expenses necessary to have a person in the workplace. It is not only personal expenses like salary, medical insurance and the like, but also expenses of the company such as office rent, electricity, water, food / cookies, conferences, computers and other equipment, program licenses, lawyers expenses, taxes, cost of development kit ... and a bunch of other items. Considering that almost everything is included in this figure, we can use it to calculate the cost of developing a game. It is also worth remembering that some developers may participate in the project for several months, while others will work throughout the development time. The total number of man-months can vary greatly for different games, but to complete the Shovel Knight, we estimated that it took approximately 144 people a month.
Now you can predict the size of game budgets! For the sake of example, a team of 50 people working 2 years? This will result in 12 million! Twelve million dollars! Now you understand how the budgets of games grow.
If you keep the numbers in your head, you probably think something like that - you told us that you were going to make a Shovel Knight with additional content for 2 years! With a team of 6 people. According to the standard rules just given, in order to make a Shovel Knight in two years, we will need $ 1,440,000! But we do not have this money!
And how do we reduce this cost? First of all, we eliminated Jake Kaufman's salary from the equation - he was generous enough to agree to pay after the game was released and hard enough to provide us with most of the necessary music and sounds very quickly. After that, the amount was reduced to 1 220 000 dollars ... not much better!
After that, we decided that, yes, the full game together with additional content would take two years, but most likely we will be able to make the main part of the game in a year, and release additional content as free add-ons, paying for its development through selling the game. If you are interested, it is precisely because of this that during the campaign on Kickstarter we were told that additional content would be released after the release. We planned all this already then! Well, the budget is reduced by half due to the shortened development period: we reduced it to 600 thousand. Getting close.
Unfortunately, we do not have any additional opportunities - just to cut the amount relying on each person twice. Now we had only 5 thousand per person per month - and this is very little. At first glance, this looks like 60 thousand a year (5 thousand a month), but considering the company's expenses, taxes, etc., it’s more like 3 thousand a month for each of us ... this is before taxes!
At this point, you probably think - 3 thousand dollars a month (in the US) before taxes, the exhausting pace of work (12-18 hours a day, 7 days a week) and no stability - is it fix for us? This is an NES game, it will not be bought. Man, the 80s are over, keep up with the times! All the cool guys are engaged in explosive AAA action movies. You will never succeed!
Not a bad question, to be honest. Add to the equation the awareness of the fact that participation in the project is not limited to the development of Shovel Knight. Since no one except us was involved in managing the company, marketing, publishing, souvenirs, support, and the like, we devoted absolutely all our time to the game. We knew that we could not finish the Shovel Knight while keeping our souls and lives intact. We will eat a Shovel Knight and see him in a dream, we will forget what the sun looks like somewhere outside our windowless office. It will be terrifying. And success is still not guaranteed.
Needless to say, the obvious reason for creating a Shovel Knight and immersing yourself in a horrific future was that we really wanted to make this game and believed in it. We loved her! And during the Kickstarter campaign, we met a lot of great people who also believed in it. Shovel Knight was needed by the world, we needed to make it and we were not afraid to sacrifice ourselves for its creation. We also wanted to control all parts of the game, from marketing to development, and did not want to transfer this right to anyone. It seems to me that this is evident in our campaign at Kickstarter!
Less obvious is that we were confident of the success of the Shovel Knight. We did not have the slightest doubt, since we had been engaged in the financing and development of games (and self-sacrifice) for many years, and we had concrete figures that supported our confidence. That is why we so confidently planned for the years ahead and promised to release additional Kickstarter goals in the form of free add-ons in the future.
What specific numbers am I talking about? These are 15 684 people who supported us during the Kickstarter campaign. Developers usually predict sales for the first week in the amount of 200-400% of pre-orders. This means that Shovel Knight should have sold 2-4 times more than 15 thousand sponsors for the first week of sales, or, in other words, 50-60 thousand copies. It seemed to us simply insane, since the most successful games from our portfolio were rarely sold in the amount of more than 50 thousand copies. But we were not going to challenge the figures. Feeling in some security, we prepared for the 12 terrible months
All this should show that planning alone does not guarantee anything! We felt confident, but in the end we lost time - remember how we did not release the game on March 31? Yes, it was at this point that our budget ended and the reserves came to an end - also known as “we were left without money” (in fact, it was March 1).
We stopped all expenses that were not vital for the game and its Kickstarter. Since we already cut out and froze most of the kickstarter awards, what else could we have cut? Electricity? Without it in any way. The Internet? Also necessary. Expenses for yourself? Well…
As a result, we had to work for five months for free. It was a difficult period, during which some of us literally faced with the inability to pay for purchases at the checkout, as their credit card was not accepted, we had to borrow money from friends and relatives. But we broke through!
As a result, we let the game in on June 26! The moment that everyone has been waiting for has come! And how did the game really sell out? If you subtract pre-orders from Kickstarter, then 7500 copies were sold in the first week! Incredible! Sales have far exceeded our forecasts of a 2-4 fold increase in the volume of pre-orders!
There are several reasons for this conservativeness of our forecasts. One of them is ... that we were at Kickstarter! This is not really preorders. People can pre-order only for a limited period of time, so the results do not fully coincide with normal pre-orders. It also seems to us that, due to the PC-nature of Kickstarter, real sales on Nintendo platforms turned out to be much higher. Nintendo users are less likely to pre-order on Kickstarter and prefer to buy the game after release. And in the end, forecasts based on pre-orders are not a mathematical formula, they are rather approximate expectations. We advertised ourselves a lot at conferences and media sites throughout the year, and people responded accordingly. Nintendo also did a great job supporting us through the placement in their stores and the use of their own marketing channels.
We not only exceeded our own expectations, but also became leaders! And although we were spreading information about the game with all our forces, this would not have happened without universal enthusiasm. This was made possible thanks to all the positive impressions, video transmissions, streams, tweets, fanart, recommendations, critical comments, letters, voices and reviews! As we can see in the illustrations, Shovel Knight won first place on 3DS, second place on Wii U and although we cannot show it (cannot find a screenshot with evidence), we were included in the 10 best-selling games on Steam. I have already said that we were fair show-offs and, contrary to all the advice, Valve launched Shovel Knight during the summer sale on Steam, when huge discounts on famous games competed with us? It was crazy, but we still made it to the top 10! We are surprised ourselves ... SteamWorld Dig seems to be a much more attractive purchase for two dollars. Regarding our second place in the Wii U store, it’s worth considering that we were competing with several free games that were distributed as part of the Mario Kart 8 advertising campaign. I didn’t expect us to beat a game sold over 2 million copies when anyone could choose in addition to a free game from the online store! We are very proud to be able to get close to Wind Waker!
The first week was great, but by itself, sales very often collapse shortly after launch - so where are we after a month? Here are the total sales for July 26:
Please note: they include pre-orders with Kickstarter and review copies.
In general, we are extremely pleased with sales! We do not have sales data for many other digital games, so we cannot compare them with anything, but we know that sales are very good for our company - for all six! We can continue to move in the chosen direction and make additional content without fear of closing or seeking additional funds. We can continue to live our dream by making awesome games for our incredible fans (and future fans)! And we still have a lot of undeveloped markets - Australia, Europe, Japan ... although they are usually smaller than the American one, they will still contribute to our future efforts. A steady stream of free add-ons with content from Kickstarter’s additional goals will also provide sales spikes at the exit of each add-on.
After the completion of the kickstarter project, we collectively discussed our sales goals. After lengthy discussions, we agreed on the figure of 150,000 copies over the entire period of sales. This was the ultimate dream! So thanks to everyone who supported us and made it possible to surpass this figure for the first month of sales. We are just shocked!
It was a crazy trip. And it is not finished yet. We make every effort to love the game, play it and buy it like hot cakes. Our new goal is 1 million copies to secure the place of modern platinum classics for Shovel Knight. Many doubted that a game for Wii U or just a digital game for Nintendo platforms might sell well, but the facts should prove that a good game with the right marketing will sell well on any platform.
Thank you all for your support !!!
But that's not all! In the next post, we will provide detailed statistics: how the Steam version was sold in different regions, how many people went through the game, how much gold was collected and much more.
Unfortunately, most developers either cannot or do not want to disclose data on projected and actual sales volumes! Fortunately, we are not the majority of developers. Hopefully we can add something to the not very large amount of information available and help other developers, journalists and enthusiasts. Without you there would be no games at all, so we feel obliged to tell you about all the details of their creation. If you know any other developers doing the same thing, be sure to write about them in the comments to help others search.
Okay, let's go! We will go all the way from dream through Kickstarter to release, sharing with you information about our sales and some other statistics for the period from June 26 to July 26. Remember that none of the published figures can not be called absolutely accurate, because for various reasons, such accuracy is extremely difficult to achieve. We tried our best!
')
It all started with Kickstarter!
To understand the meaning of our current sales, you need to know how it all began! On April 13, 2013, we ended our campaign on Kickstarter, during which our beloved 14,749 sponsors raised $ 311,502. At the same time, we collected donations through PayPal, where 935 sponsors raised $ 17,180. After the campaign ended, we asked all the sponsors on which platform they would like to see the game ... and here are the results!
To our surprise, Nintendo sponsors provided only a third of the total support. We expected much more from them, especially considering how much our campaign was focused (or so it seemed to us?) On Nintendo platforms. Were skeptics right, were indie games really bad on Nintendo? We will return to this issue later, when we talk about total sales, but we can probably say that in those days Kickstarter was still a PC-oriented platform.
As a result, we started the development of Shovel Knight with $ 328,682 for the entire development period (do not forget that in these 328 thousand, taxes, the share of Kickstarter itself, commission fees, withdrawn payment sponsors and the like) are not yet taken into account. By itself, the amount is certainly rather big, but not very big, if we are talking about game development!
This may sound unexpected, but the development of even a small downloadable game can cost more than a million dollars! Our plans required the full employment of five people (six, given Jake) for two years (including the year to develop the game and the year to create the content provided for by the additional goals of the Kickstarter). Such a game is simply impossible to make for 328 thousand dollars! Let's see why:
Development cost
What usually makes up the cost of the game? How do you even define it? To be honest, it is quite difficult to do, but the standard approach comes down to determining the number of developers and multiplying their cost by the development time. This is not the most accurate way, since in the game development world we usually criminally underestimate the time and effort needed to create each component. Usually this is offset by some exaggeration of time / salary / quantity in the formula.
Let's do it for Shovel Knight! Nowadays, in most studios, the average cost of a developer is 10 thousand dollars per person per month. What does it mean? In fact, each developer will cost the company 10 thousand dollars a month or 120 thousand dollars a year. It does not at all mean that each developer will receive so much per month, on the contrary, most likely none of the developers will receive so much.
The thing is that these monthly 10 thousand dollars include not only a trivial salary, but also a lot of other expenses. They include all the expenses necessary to have a person in the workplace. It is not only personal expenses like salary, medical insurance and the like, but also expenses of the company such as office rent, electricity, water, food / cookies, conferences, computers and other equipment, program licenses, lawyers expenses, taxes, cost of development kit ... and a bunch of other items. Considering that almost everything is included in this figure, we can use it to calculate the cost of developing a game. It is also worth remembering that some developers may participate in the project for several months, while others will work throughout the development time. The total number of man-months can vary greatly for different games, but to complete the Shovel Knight, we estimated that it took approximately 144 people a month.
Now you can predict the size of game budgets! For the sake of example, a team of 50 people working 2 years? This will result in 12 million! Twelve million dollars! Now you understand how the budgets of games grow.
If you keep the numbers in your head, you probably think something like that - you told us that you were going to make a Shovel Knight with additional content for 2 years! With a team of 6 people. According to the standard rules just given, in order to make a Shovel Knight in two years, we will need $ 1,440,000! But we do not have this money!
And how do we reduce this cost? First of all, we eliminated Jake Kaufman's salary from the equation - he was generous enough to agree to pay after the game was released and hard enough to provide us with most of the necessary music and sounds very quickly. After that, the amount was reduced to 1 220 000 dollars ... not much better!
After that, we decided that, yes, the full game together with additional content would take two years, but most likely we will be able to make the main part of the game in a year, and release additional content as free add-ons, paying for its development through selling the game. If you are interested, it is precisely because of this that during the campaign on Kickstarter we were told that additional content would be released after the release. We planned all this already then! Well, the budget is reduced by half due to the shortened development period: we reduced it to 600 thousand. Getting close.
Unfortunately, we do not have any additional opportunities - just to cut the amount relying on each person twice. Now we had only 5 thousand per person per month - and this is very little. At first glance, this looks like 60 thousand a year (5 thousand a month), but considering the company's expenses, taxes, etc., it’s more like 3 thousand a month for each of us ... this is before taxes!
At this point, you probably think - 3 thousand dollars a month (in the US) before taxes, the exhausting pace of work (12-18 hours a day, 7 days a week) and no stability - is it fix for us? This is an NES game, it will not be bought. Man, the 80s are over, keep up with the times! All the cool guys are engaged in explosive AAA action movies. You will never succeed!
What the hell is it for us?
Not a bad question, to be honest. Add to the equation the awareness of the fact that participation in the project is not limited to the development of Shovel Knight. Since no one except us was involved in managing the company, marketing, publishing, souvenirs, support, and the like, we devoted absolutely all our time to the game. We knew that we could not finish the Shovel Knight while keeping our souls and lives intact. We will eat a Shovel Knight and see him in a dream, we will forget what the sun looks like somewhere outside our windowless office. It will be terrifying. And success is still not guaranteed.
Needless to say, the obvious reason for creating a Shovel Knight and immersing yourself in a horrific future was that we really wanted to make this game and believed in it. We loved her! And during the Kickstarter campaign, we met a lot of great people who also believed in it. Shovel Knight was needed by the world, we needed to make it and we were not afraid to sacrifice ourselves for its creation. We also wanted to control all parts of the game, from marketing to development, and did not want to transfer this right to anyone. It seems to me that this is evident in our campaign at Kickstarter!
Less obvious is that we were confident of the success of the Shovel Knight. We did not have the slightest doubt, since we had been engaged in the financing and development of games (and self-sacrifice) for many years, and we had concrete figures that supported our confidence. That is why we so confidently planned for the years ahead and promised to release additional Kickstarter goals in the form of free add-ons in the future.
What specific numbers am I talking about? These are 15 684 people who supported us during the Kickstarter campaign. Developers usually predict sales for the first week in the amount of 200-400% of pre-orders. This means that Shovel Knight should have sold 2-4 times more than 15 thousand sponsors for the first week of sales, or, in other words, 50-60 thousand copies. It seemed to us simply insane, since the most successful games from our portfolio were rarely sold in the amount of more than 50 thousand copies. But we were not going to challenge the figures. Feeling in some security, we prepared for the 12 terrible months
All this should show that planning alone does not guarantee anything! We felt confident, but in the end we lost time - remember how we did not release the game on March 31? Yes, it was at this point that our budget ended and the reserves came to an end - also known as “we were left without money” (in fact, it was March 1).
We stopped all expenses that were not vital for the game and its Kickstarter. Since we already cut out and froze most of the kickstarter awards, what else could we have cut? Electricity? Without it in any way. The Internet? Also necessary. Expenses for yourself? Well…
As a result, we had to work for five months for free. It was a difficult period, during which some of us literally faced with the inability to pay for purchases at the checkout, as their credit card was not accepted, we had to borrow money from friends and relatives. But we broke through!
Sales in the first five months
As a result, we let the game in on June 26! The moment that everyone has been waiting for has come! And how did the game really sell out? If you subtract pre-orders from Kickstarter, then 7500 copies were sold in the first week! Incredible! Sales have far exceeded our forecasts of a 2-4 fold increase in the volume of pre-orders!
There are several reasons for this conservativeness of our forecasts. One of them is ... that we were at Kickstarter! This is not really preorders. People can pre-order only for a limited period of time, so the results do not fully coincide with normal pre-orders. It also seems to us that, due to the PC-nature of Kickstarter, real sales on Nintendo platforms turned out to be much higher. Nintendo users are less likely to pre-order on Kickstarter and prefer to buy the game after release. And in the end, forecasts based on pre-orders are not a mathematical formula, they are rather approximate expectations. We advertised ourselves a lot at conferences and media sites throughout the year, and people responded accordingly. Nintendo also did a great job supporting us through the placement in their stores and the use of their own marketing channels.
We not only exceeded our own expectations, but also became leaders! And although we were spreading information about the game with all our forces, this would not have happened without universal enthusiasm. This was made possible thanks to all the positive impressions, video transmissions, streams, tweets, fanart, recommendations, critical comments, letters, voices and reviews! As we can see in the illustrations, Shovel Knight won first place on 3DS, second place on Wii U and although we cannot show it (cannot find a screenshot with evidence), we were included in the 10 best-selling games on Steam. I have already said that we were fair show-offs and, contrary to all the advice, Valve launched Shovel Knight during the summer sale on Steam, when huge discounts on famous games competed with us? It was crazy, but we still made it to the top 10! We are surprised ourselves ... SteamWorld Dig seems to be a much more attractive purchase for two dollars. Regarding our second place in the Wii U store, it’s worth considering that we were competing with several free games that were distributed as part of the Mario Kart 8 advertising campaign. I didn’t expect us to beat a game sold over 2 million copies when anyone could choose in addition to a free game from the online store! We are very proud to be able to get close to Wind Waker!
The first week was great, but by itself, sales very often collapse shortly after launch - so where are we after a month? Here are the total sales for July 26:
Please note: they include pre-orders with Kickstarter and review copies.
In general, we are extremely pleased with sales! We do not have sales data for many other digital games, so we cannot compare them with anything, but we know that sales are very good for our company - for all six! We can continue to move in the chosen direction and make additional content without fear of closing or seeking additional funds. We can continue to live our dream by making awesome games for our incredible fans (and future fans)! And we still have a lot of undeveloped markets - Australia, Europe, Japan ... although they are usually smaller than the American one, they will still contribute to our future efforts. A steady stream of free add-ons with content from Kickstarter’s additional goals will also provide sales spikes at the exit of each add-on.
Thank!!!
After the completion of the kickstarter project, we collectively discussed our sales goals. After lengthy discussions, we agreed on the figure of 150,000 copies over the entire period of sales. This was the ultimate dream! So thanks to everyone who supported us and made it possible to surpass this figure for the first month of sales. We are just shocked!
It was a crazy trip. And it is not finished yet. We make every effort to love the game, play it and buy it like hot cakes. Our new goal is 1 million copies to secure the place of modern platinum classics for Shovel Knight. Many doubted that a game for Wii U or just a digital game for Nintendo platforms might sell well, but the facts should prove that a good game with the right marketing will sell well on any platform.
Thank you all for your support !!!
But that's not all! In the next post, we will provide detailed statistics: how the Steam version was sold in different regions, how many people went through the game, how much gold was collected and much more.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/233475/
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