10 Video Game Developers Who Genuinely Care About Their Fans

Shovel Knight is yet another example of how to correctly manage a Kickstarter campaign. The NES-inspired 2D side-scrolling platformer was built from the ground-up to be as authentic to those classic games as possible, from the 8-bit sprites through to the music written on a VCR6 sound chip. This dedication caught the attention of fans, and Shovel Knight soon blasted past its $75,000 funding goal to reach its stretch goal of over $311,000.

Part of those stretch goals was to add three additional knights to the game post-release. This is where Yacht Club Games proved to their fans they were serious about their craft and their fan base.

It would have been easier to just re-skin the titular character three different times and slightly tweak the knight's move set. That would have kept their promise and allowed Yacht Club Games to move onto new ventures. Instead, the developer took on a massive undertaking to re-design and rebuild Shovel Knight three different times, making these new knights feel fresh and different. This added a further five years to their development cycle at no extra cost to the fans who had showed faith in them.

Yacht Club Games showed an astonishing loyalty to these fans, which helped produce one of the best platformers ever made.