Not so for Mina. D’Angelo isn’t taking DLC off the table entirely, and does clarify that the team has some quality-of-life updates planned as well as a randomizer mode. “But like, we’ve literally never talked about [major DLC] or thought about it. And like, the game is huge and big. I don’t even know, we’d have to really figure out even how to add something to it.”
However, D’Angelo does say that Yacht Club is keen on spending more time with Mina. So while he’s not announcing anything at the moment, yes, the team has talked about a potential sequel. A lot.
“We’ve got pretty clear ideas, and we’ve put hints in Mina about where it could go a little bit. No one’s going to pick those up. But if we did make Mina 2, it’d be like, ‘Oh, they put that in there on purpose, right?’ But, yeah. In a couple weeks, we’ll find out how everyone’s feeling about everything, but my guess is everyone will want to take a break from Mina. But that said, we think of Mina like Shovel Knight. It’s a tentpole game of our studio that we [want to] keep going.”
Mina the Hollower has already sold 300,000 copies in three days according to Bloomberg, and is thus far the best-reviewed game of the year (I certainly loved it). Its co-founders are hoping to see that number climb significantly higher, and D’Angelo says sales of Mina will play a major role in what the studio does next. “If we sell a couple hundred thousand, we’re good to make a certain kind of game. And if we sell millions of copies, we’re good to make a different kind of game. Or be a certain size of a studio or what have you. We’re hoping it’s a Shovel Knight-style game in the end [Shovel Knight had sold 2.65 million copies as of September 2019]. That’s what has kept us going. But that said, even if it sold half as many units as Shovel Knight, maybe Mina makes Shovel Knight sell more units.”
Sales figures obviously matter for every studio, but it’s especially critical for Yacht Club, which has determinedly embraced its own independence from the beginning and refused to take funding from major publishers. That’s one of the reasons why Yacht Club went to Kickstarter to begin with, and that’s why it returned to Kickstarter for Mina. “When you take other people’s money, it comes with baggage, right?” says D’Angelo. “So unless someone is like, ‘We’re going to give you money and there’s no strings attached,’ right? Then we’re like, ‘Oh, we’re getting interested.’”