Mina the Hollower sales steady Yacht Club Games as most of the team moves to a 3D game
Mina sold over 500,000 copies in two weeks. Sean Velasco says that bought stability "for now", and randomizer and speedrun features are still on the way.
Yacht Club Games says Mina the Hollower has given the studio financial stability "for now", and most of its developers have already moved on to an unannounced 3D game. The comments came in a community AMA that Eurogamer reported on October 30, 2026, five months after Mina launched on May 28.
Make-or-break, then breathing room
Before release, Yacht Club openly called Mina the Hollower a make-or-break moment. The pandemic and a failed attempt to run the studio as a two-project outfit had left the Shovel Knight team stretched thin. Asked whether Mina had secured the company's finances, co-founder Sean Velasco answered "yes… for now!"
The numbers back that up. Mina passed 500,000 copies sold in its first two weeks, which puts it halfway to the one million copies the developers once said they were hoping for.
The 3D project
Velasco previously told Bloomberg that a 3D Shovel Knight game was roughly half finished when the whole studio dropped everything to ship Mina. Developer Alec Faulkner stopped short of naming Shovel Knight this time, but confirmed that "most of us are currently working on a 3D game, yes!" He would not say more.
Co-founder Nick Wozniak was candid about what went wrong in the years before Mina. He said keeping the team "tight and focused" is what helped the game land, and that splitting staff across two games was a mistake the studio could have corrected much earlier. The takeaway is a one-game-at-a-time studio again.
Mina keeps getting updates
Moving most staff to a new project does not mean Mina is finished. The team says more post-release features are in the works, including expanded randomizer options, enemy and boss randomization, extra modifiers and dedicated speedrunner tools. Talk of the kind of DLC and spin-off campaigns that kept Shovel Knight going for years is off the table for now.
For players in Southeast Asia, Mina is available on Steam for PC, Mac and Linux, and on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch and Switch 2. Eurogamer gave it five stars at launch, and the new post-release modes give speedrunners and replay fans a reason to jump back in.
Source: Eurogamer; Mina the Hollower on Steam.
