Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games will be in serious trouble if its next release isn't a hit: 'It's make-or-break for sure'
Shovel Knight was a major indie hit, with more than three million copies sold, an "overwhelmingly positive" rating on Steam, and a brand so recognizable it's spawned spinoffs and crossovers with games ranging from Bloodstained to For Honor. But in the 10 years since Shovel Knight first appeared, developer Yacht Club Games has struggled to produce a full-on follow-up hit, and in a new interview with Bloomberg, studio founder Cris Velasco says it will be in serious trouble if its next game isn't a success.
That 'next game' would be Mina the Hollower, a sort of gothic Link's Awakening that was revealed to the world in 2022. "It’s make-or-break for sure," Velasco said. "If we sold 500,000 copies, then we would be golden. If we sold even 200,000, that would be really, really great. If we sold, like, 100,000, that’s not so good."
Development of Mina the Hollower has been troubled, according to the interview. The game was proposed in 2019 and work began in earnest in early 2020, when Yacht Club split into two teams, one for the full-on Shovel Knight sequel—that 3D project we heard about back in 2020, apparently—and the other to handle Mina the Hollower, which was intended to be a smaller-scale project.
But Yacht Club itself struggled with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which landed in full force right around the same time, and the two-team structure, which ultimately didn't work out. The studio laid off some employees and turned everything it had left toward Mina the Hollower, which had grown dramatically in scope. The game industry as a whole, meanwhile, has been decimated by post-Covid contraction and the big-money embrace of generative AI over the past few years, an ugliness that still shows no sign of letting up.
Then came the last-minute delay: Mina the Hollower had been set to launch on October 31, but on October 6 Yacht Club hit the brakes, saying it needed more time "to apply some final polish and balancing to make the game truly shine." The delay would not be "major," the studio wrote, but a new launch date still hasn't been announced.
The upside for Yacht Club is that there's clearly demand for Mina the Hollower—a 2022 Kickstarter campaign raised more than $1.2 million—and a demo released earlier this year made a good impression: PC Gamer's Tyler Colp said it "awakened the GBA kid in me," which sounds like a bullseye in the making. But the game industry is fickle and unforgiving, and also tremendously crowded, and on the indie front especially there's just no such thing as a 'sure thing' anymore.
Yacht Club is apparently ditching its office and going fully remote at the end of 2025, and hopes to continue working on one game at a time after Mina the Hollower is out. As for what happens if Mina isn't a hit, that remains to be seen: Velasco said Yacht Club will "still be around," but added, "we would need more money."