Mina the Hollower sold 300,000 copies in three days over its launch weekend, with developer Yacht Club Games assuring it is going to be “fine” after previously saying this game would be “make-or-break” for the studio.
Sharing these latest sales figures, Yacht Club Games’ studio founder Sean Velasco and lead programmer David D’Angelo tell me it’s “pretty cool” to see Mina the Hollower reaching audiences in the way it has, with praise being bestowed upon it across the industry. When I jokingly tell the duo they are allowed to be excited about reaching such an impressive sales milestone already (as a reminder, Mina the Hollower only released on Friday, 29th May), they laugh.
“We can never be excited,” D’Angelo says with a playful grin.”It’s always ‘how can we sell more?’ – people in China aren’t buying it; France’s numbers are really low, so how do we get the French to buy it?” Velasco chimes in, “Yeah, how come Mewgenics sold so good?” “And 007 sold 1.5m in a day, what are we doing wrong,” D’Angelo adds in good humour.
Even so, 300,000 copies sold is certainly not a figure to be sniffed at. In December, Velasco called Mina’s release a “make-or-break” moment for Yacht Club Games, saying if the studio only sold 100,000 copies, it would be in trouble. However, if it managed to sell over 200,000, “that would be really, really great”. Thankfully it has already surpassed that figure.
As for where Mina the Hollower has been most popular so far, that would be in English speaking countries such as the US, though the team has ensured it’s also available in multiple different languages to improve its overall reach and appeal. In terms of sales across platforms, Steam is currently leading the charge, followed by Switch and PlayStation, with Xbox then bringing up the rear. But when it comes to future projections, the studio is “still trying to work out how the curve is going to go”.
“For example, Shovel Knight was slower to decay than other games, so I guess for us we have to figure out if this is just a huge burst at the start [for Mina the Hollower], and it’s going to drop off a lot,” D’Angelo says. “We don’t really know. Maybe in a month or two we will have a better idea of what it means for the future of what kind of stuff we are making.”
But while critical acclaim has no doubt played a large part in the game’s commercial success, another indisputable contributor to Mina the Hollower’s popularity is its price tag. In the UK, Mina the Hollower is £17.75. In the US, it is $20. Given how much pressure there was on the game to do well ahead of its release, what made the developers risk going in at a lower price bracket?
“I mean, we are generally like ‘let’s price things high’,” D’Angelo replies, “that’s our attitude, games are worth more money than people are paying for them. We try not to discount our games. So, we thought [Mina the Hollower] was going to be a $30 game.” However, when the time came to put the price on the various storefronts, the development team came to the conclusion $30 would be too expensive.
“Everyone was like, I don’t think it can be $30. No one has money right now. The state of the world is essentially ‘I don’t think we can ask people to pay $30 for a pixel art game’,” D’Angelo explains. “It’s too much.”
As well as an appreciation of the political climate the studio was releasing its game into, D’Angelo and Velasco admit they also wanted to price Mina the Hollower at a point where it was a “no brainer” for people to buy it on release. “It’s a great game, it has 20 to 30 hours of content, so for 20 bucks it’s a steal, I think,” D’Angelo says with a smile.
In all seriousness, though, Velasco says the response to Mina and the Hollower couldn’t have been better. “It feels great, it’s awesome,” he says, before admitting the team made some less than conventional choices when it came to Mina’s overall design, which could have negatively impacted the game’s reception. “We knew it was the best thing we had made, and we were really happy with it, but at the same time, it is a game you could get lost in, a game you could use a weapon and it is not the right one for you. And it is weird, and scary,” D’Angelo explains.
“We made some very strong choices that we thought people might not ‘rub the right way with’,” he says, “so it really is amazing to see how it has clicked with everyone.”
We recently awarded Mina the Hollower five stars. “Here is a game that feels like an adventure,” Christian Donlan wrote in Eurogamer’s review. “It’s Zelda and it’s Bloodborne. It’s smacking bosses and reading the in-game newspaper. All of which is to say that those six years of design work are apparent throughout, in the complexity of the landscapes you travel, in the density of the secrets and the lore.”
