[Update]: Shovel Knight devs are working on a new 8-bit action-adventure - Mina the Hollower!

In an update that came as a bit of a surprise to me, Shovel Knight's developer Yacht Club Games announced that they have now managed to sell two million copies. I genuinely expected that number to be much higher given how fun Shovel Knight truly is, as well as how many platforms it has appeared on over the years. That said, two million sales is still a pretty darn impressive accomplishment!

"Just 18 months after its original debut, Shovel Knight surpassed one million copies sold total. Since then, the road to 2 million has been arduous but at the very end of February, an extensive 26 months later, we reached a colossal milestone," reads the developer update. "Thank you everyone for your unbelievable support! It is so inspiring that people still pick up, play, and fall in love with Shovel Knight for the first time every day."

Not everything has gone according to play, however, as the developers revealed further down in the update. Apparently, both of the expansions (Plague of Shadows and Specter of Torment) have proven to be enormous financial failures despite being widely praised by the players and critics alike.

"After our last sales update, we made it pretty clear that going all out on Plague of Shadows was not worth it financially! We spent more than a million dollars developing the game and made zero dollars… woopsies," the developers continued. "Well, it turns out we’re not very good with money as we ran into the same problem again by stubbornly doubling down."

"We made one big change this time! In addition to being a free update to existing owners of Shovel Knight, we also sold Specter of Torment separately. It didn’t do spectacular numbers, but it just broke the 50k sold benchmark. That recovers about 25% of our development costs! A marked improvement over Plague of Shadows 0%, ha!"

I can only hope the developers will have much better luck in the future because both expansions provided plenty of unique and interesting gameplay. I suppose we'll find out soon enough as the final King of Cards expansion is set to arrive at some point in 2018.

You can read the whole developer update and analysis, as well as learn more about Shovel Knight itself, by heading over to the official website.