5/20/2023 0 Comments Cyber shadow game engine![]() With Yacht Club, it's a very close, very open relationship in which all of the knowledge it accumulated selling 2.65 million units of Shovel Knight is there for the taking. With so many indie publishers scouting for product, any new player in the market needs to offer something distinct to potential partners. "They have access to our creative, we review all the work, we play the game, we record ourselves playing the game. We show them our development tools, which they might want to make for themselves, and then they own their process better. We're not 'Here's a bunch of money, go make your game, we'll QA it and send it out.' We care a lot about the developer. "Our publishing philosophy, a lot of it is sharing knowledge. "We were already apologetic about how long it was taking to finish King of Cards, so I was the one who could actually push that forward. "It was time the development team just didn't have." Chan says. "Seriously, every time people ask us for advice, the first thing we tell them is, please, watch your stretch goals" Chan only joined the company the following year, and his experience allowed the founders to focus on making games while he assessed and shaped the business - publishing strategy included. ![]() In fact, Yacht Club published Inti Creates' Gunvolt Striker Pack in the US back in 2016, but it proved to be a step too far, too soon at that point. We're gonna end the five year dev cycle, take a couple of weeks off, and then come back and say 'Okay, what are we gonna do?'"Ĭhan is referring to the company's next game, of course, but it is also using the success and stability that Shovel Knight created to make what is an increasingly familiar move: third-party publishing. This will be the wrap up, this will be the end of Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove, and then it'll be pre-production on the next thing, which we're not quite sure what it is yet. We're very lucky to have fans who bought multiple copies or are bringing other people in, which allows us to continue to make the game. "We've been developing this for five straight years now it's just content updates, and it's all free content updates, because it's stuff we promised. "Seriously, every time people ask us for advice, the first thing we tell them is, please, watch your stretch goals," Chan says. Yacht Club, it seems, is still working through the promises it made to those very early backers. At one point, the studio had only planned for two years into its own future, but the Shovel Knight Kickstarter campaign launched in March 2013, and Chan is at Gamescom 2019 pushing more content - specifically King of Cards and Showdown - for the same basic product. Yacht Club far exceeded its own projected sales and headcount, but the other key metric here is time. We try to maintain a flat corporate structure, which makes expansion a little bit difficult, but that's our DNA as a company." I think the place will probably stay quite small for the foreseeable future. "As of last month it was 2.65 million, and we're now 17 people. "It went a lot better than that, yeah," Chan says, smiling. Let's just say it beat that target, and then some. In its first info dump after Shovel Knight's launch, Yacht Club planned to fund a team of five people for two years, based on lifetime sales of 150,000 units. It's going to make us better as an industry"Ī side benefit of that consistently open philosophy is the opportunity to compare then with now. "We love to share information because we believe in it. ![]() 'They're sharing everything, and now it's my turn to try.'" It's not only going to make us better as an industry, but also be inspirational to others. "People love playing games - it can be the core of their personality - but making games always seems like a magical thing that you don't know how to do. "It's a little bit voodoo magic and a little bit rockstar, all at the same time," Chan says. Game development is "aspirational," and the industry has never been transparent enough to really help developers just starting out. Speaking to at Gamescom, Yacht Club COO James Chan says that the reason for the regular, minutely detailed blog posts on costs and marketing and sales has always been the same. That was true back in 2014, when its first (and still only) IP Shovel Knight had been on the market for a month, and it has stayed true in the five years that have passed since. ![]() Search our archives and you'll find multiple news stories based on the kind of data that most developers guard like a vial of magic potion. As a studio, Yacht Club Games is remarkable not just for its success, but also its transparency.
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