Shovel Knight: over 1.2 million units sold, sales breakdown + new 3DS Themes

On Thursday, Yacht Club Games made a major announcement: as of April 1st, Shovel Knight has sold over 1.2 million units in Europe and North America. That includes 200 000 units sold at retail. The game sold 1 million units total in December 2015, and 1 million units via digital platforms only in February 2016.

Here’s the sales breakdown per platform:

Sales on Nintendo platforms have been pretty strong, even on the Wii U.

Here’s some facts:

• In general, the game sales are still very strong. In November 2015 we actually sold more units digitally on Nintendo Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, and Steam in North America (our initial release platforms) than we did in the same month the previous year, November 2014.
• Contrarily to the previous point, March 2016 was our worst sales month since our initial release. Oh no!
• The first 6 months of sales on all Sony platforms are equivalent to the total first 6 months on just the Nintendo Wii U. On Nintendo 3DS we sold about 50% more than Sony. Alternatively, Microsoft is 50% of Sony.
• We typically average 25k-35k units a month.
• Steam is our best seller, but it’s also benefited the most from discounted sales. In an average month, Nintendo 3DS almost sells twice as much as Steam.

At retail, Shovel Knight sold 200 000 units: a pretty impressive number for an indie game! Here’s the sale breakdown by platformer, and by store (in North America only for that one):

Here’s some additional facts:

• In 2015, each month we typically sold twice as much at retail when compared to digital. Into 2016, the platforms now sell about 1:1.
• It appears that retail sales did not cannibalize digital sales at all. The sales data looks more like we’re selling on a new platform rather than a percentage of people moving away from digital. It’s possible this could change over the course of the year though.
• Interestingly, the retail release did not help the digital release! When we launch on another system we normally see a small boost on the currently existing platforms, but that wasn’t the case with retail.
• We’ve currently sold through about 70% of our retail stock.
• Retailers requested the most PS4 stock, but Wii U has been our best seller!
• Note, for a $24.99 copy of the retail game, we receive a 3-4 dollars less than our digital release, which sells for $14.99. Also, we still haven’t actually been paid for retail product due to the long tail of not knowing if all the units will sell.

Finally, some data about amiibo. Yacht Club Games ordered 200 000 of them, and 180 000 have been sold (60 000 in Europe, and 120 000 in North America).

Here’s a graph and some facts about amiibo sales:

• When we were considering the possibility of releasing before Christmas, we would have launched with just 25k units in the US. We sold 75k units in our first week! We are very glad we delayed the release until after Chirstmas- after all, that would have been a lot of would be knights left out in the cold.
• Europe and Canada have almost sold out of units!
• We sold about 10k units in March in North America.
• The amiibo only sells online at Wal-Mart because our distributor was worried we couldn’t keep all 10,000 stores in America full with stock.
• The amiibo did not increase game sales as much as we might have expected. During January, we saw a small bump in sales, particularly on Wii U, but only slightly higher than normal. The strongest benefit was Wii U physical sales, which probably sold around 3k more than we expected for that month.
• We spent 3 months of everyone’s full attention developing, playtesting, and iterating  on the amiibo content! In other words, just the game content cost the development team $240,000. In our in-depth amiibo article, we’ll detail how much we get from each unit. Be sure to check that out in the near future!

Make sure to check out this post on Gamasutra for even more data, facts, and graphs!

Finally, here’s some good news for players who want more Shovel Knight on their Nintendo 3DS: two themes will be released pretty soon in Europe and North America. Here’s the release date for each region:

• North America: April 28th
• Europe: May 13th

You can find a preview of each Shovel Knight Theme on Yacht Club Games’s website!