Yacht Club Games needs its next title, Mina the Hollower, to be a success.
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?
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.
As far as I understand it, the vast majority of ‘successful’ indie studios are in the same boat. You need to continual decent hits to keep afloat in an ever turbulent and flooding market. Even if the next title is successful, they already mentioned the other looming problem, burnout. You might be able to push yourself through one game, two is a struggle, and very few make it to three.
To me, and maybe I’m being a bit cynical, but this feels like a very foreboding article.
I would ordinarily put my top-level thoughts in the “Body” part of the link submission, but I’ve found that a lot of people here only read that box without reading the article, so I’ll put them in a comment here.
“Your company is only as strong as your last game,” says Celia Schilling, marketing director at Yacht Club.
This is true when you’re a single project studio.
By 2024, Yacht Club finally acknowledged that the two-team structure wasn’t working. It laid off some employees to cut expenses and paused development on the Shovel Knight sequel so everyone could work on Mina the Hollower, with Velasco taking over as director. What was once considered a less ambitious side project is now the company’s largest game ever.
My read on this is that the the two-team structure wasn’t the problem, but scope creep was, not to mention the bad fit for initial project direction that they acknowledged elsewhere in the article. I’m quite sure Mina the Hollower will hit their sales target of 200k copies. Hopefully they scale back up responsibly after that.
Great article, but a very painful one to read. Mina the Hollower was one of my most anticipated games this year, and it sucked that it got delayed the same month it was supposed to release in.
What was once considered a less ambitious side project is now the company’s largest game ever. “We basically had to redo everything,” D’Angelo says. If they’d all stuck together from the beginning, Gordon says, “we would’ve finished it two to three years ago.”
So it sounds like the game got delayed because they were split into two teams. One was working on a 3D Shovel Knight sequel, and one was working on Mina the Hollower. The person directing the latter was struggling and slowed down the project, so they fired a bunch of people, focused on Mina, and basically restarted its development.
The good news is that if things go to plan, they said they’ll revisit the 3D Shovel Knight game. I’m really looking forward to that.
