Shovel Knight Developer Yacht Club Games says it needs its next release, Mina the Hollower, to succeed, otherwise the company may have to downsize, give up its independence, or worse, with co-founder Sean Velasco claiming, “This is a game-changer for sure.”
Shovel Knight became the first major indie game to succeed on Kickstarter. Raising over $300,000 during the campaign, Yacht Club generated a lot of goodwill by not only delivering a great game, but also exceeding its ambitious goals with three full game expansions.
However, that was back in 2014, and although the small studio has released several Shovel Knight spin-offs, it has yet to find a second hit. All hopes are pinned on Mina the Hollower, a Game Boy-style soul that began development in 2019. Six years later, Mina has still not broken through to the surface.
New report from Bloomberg reveals that things may be more dire at Yacht Club than expected for a studio with a groundbreaking hit like Shovel Knight. A number of factors appear to have contributed to the situation, including the pandemic, a small team split in half to work on two projects simultaneously, and worse-than-expected sales of spin-off games Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon and Shovel Knight Dig.
“This is definitely a defining moment,” Velasco says. “If we sold 500,000 copies, we'd be gold. If we sold even 200,000, that would be very, very great. If we sold around 100,000, it wouldn’t be that good.” He doesn't think the yacht club will close if Mina can't sell it, but the company's future is uncertain. “If Mina fails, we will still be there,” Velasco says. “[But] we will need more money.”
Yacht Club has already left its office and moved to a remote model following the delay of Mine Hollow from its original Halloween 2025 release date. However, the developer claims that the game is playable from start to finish, although the team still needs time to polish it, and reviews of the demo have been excellent.
Co-founder Nick Wozniak blames the long development cycle for the burden that now falls on the mighty mouse's shoulders. “In the future, we'll try to find ways to release a game every couple of years rather than every five or six,” Wozniak says. “We haven’t released a game in so long.”
The team is confident in the quality of the game, but this does not always lead to sales. As Alex Faulkner, who came up with the original idea for Mine Hollow, put it, “the project is just damned.”
“We've been looking at the Zelda Oracle games,” says developer Shovel Knight, but the gorgeous Hollow Mine is actually more “like Castlevania or Bloodborne.”
