Shovel Knight: A Crowdsourcing Success Story
Recently in class Dr. Perreault gave a lecture in which she touched a bit on the subject of crowdsourcing, and she said that it’s a system built around “niche media.” I had never really heard the subject described in this way, but I immediately felt that this description was right on the money. Crowdsourcing allows people with a common interest in a particular subject to work together and each contribute some amount toward reaching a goal; this goal likely falls into a niche that renders it inviable to push toward a more mainstream audience. But when the required funds of a project are clearly laid out and it is opened to audience donations, a project can find great success through crowdfunding. Among these various projects and goals, there have of course been a number of video games funded through this method. And perhaps the most famous among those is Shovel Knight.
Launching a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, Yacht Club Games proposed Shovel Knight as a game that harkened back to the days of classic 2-D platforming games, a genre of games sorely lacking in recent years. The game needed a minimum of $75,000 to get funded, and by the end of the campaign made over $310,000, reaching every one of its stretch goals. Shovel Knight finally released in 2014 to stellar reviews and continues to receive new updates to this day. So what made it such a rousing crowdsource success story? Well, one might say it was several factors that contributed.
For one, Yacht Club had impeccable timing; at the time of Shovel Knight’s announcement gamers were experiencing a severe lack in the platforming genre, with only a small handful of widely successful games of this type releasing in recent years. Secondly, though the project possessed modern game design sensibilities, it also evoked a strong sense of nostalgia and yesteryear charm in its audience. It did this by taking great influence from many classic platforming games (particularly those of the NES era) in its gameplay mechanics, level design, art direction, etc. There have been many games released in the past few years that have had simplistic pixel art styles or chiptune soundtracks in the hopes of making a quick appeal to gamer nostalgia, but Shovel Knight immediately stood out for how thoroughly and genuinely every aspect of it emulated and celebrated the past. Finally, Yacht Club showed a strong sense for marketing and communication with its audience both during and after the game’s campaign. They provided frequent updates on their Kickstarter page from the start of the campaign to the game’s final release (and they still make posts to this day about new updates the game is receiving). To further drum up excitement Yacht Club also provided multiple popular Let’s Players of YouTube with early demos to play on their channels and provide feedback, and the company had playable set-ups at multiple large gaming conventions.
So if one were to describe what led to Shovel Knight’s success in one way, one could say that it was Yacht Club’s understanding of their audience. This was a game that other companies might have seen as too risky, a type of game no longer viable in today’s market. But Yacht Club saw that there was still an audience for this type of game, and that with a strong enough appeal they could bring them together to make something great.
Images Courtesy of:
Yacht Club Games
