But... how do you really feel?

there's nothing crap about shovel knight's graphics, they're excellent. in fact, if shovel knight had the graphics of awesomenauts i'd have probably not purchased it at all. yes, i think graphics are important, especially when trying to create a cohesive whole; something shovel knight does better than pretty much any throwback platformer out there, with odallus coming in second.

and as for your second point about industry corruption and billion dollar companies locking there games down, etc... i agree entirely! it's actually why i spend the vast majority of my gaming dollars here at gog and itch.io. steam can eat a dick, screwplay can eat a dick, origin can eat a dick, the entire console industry can eat a dick, and lastly battle.net can choke on a penis as well.

For me the takeaway is that even though the percentage of sales on GOG is very low, it's still plenty of money to simply refuse to take! As in, consider all the indie whiners who complain that making a release on GOG is not worth their time because the sales "would be" so low. If they made just one dollar of profit for each copy sold, that'd be $12k. Assuming a fairly high salary, that'd pay for two months of developer time. Do people really think it would take two months of work (full time!) to get a game on GOG? No way in hell, unless they're doing something really really wrong. And it's fair to assume that most titles will net much more than one dollar per copy so the yield in reality ought to be much, much better.. :)

Of course, the sales for unwanted titles could be so low that it isn't really worth it. Yeah there are some indie games nobody wants to buy. That's a separate issue altogether. I don't think these are the games whose developers are asked if they'd bring their game to GOG.

As others have pointed out, Shovel Knight hasn't seen particularly many or good sales here. It's an interesting looking game, on my wishlist, but not interesting enough for me to justify paying the full price. I would if they freed the source code, though! I asked about it on the release stream on twitch/gogcom, but the dev said nah.

What are you on about? Not even once I've mentioned PC superiority. :v

I simply argued about you generalization of "this is primarily a console game".

Also, let's not forget that both 3DS and Vita are a different market, so everything is practically spread even.

OK. Let's stop there.

ಠ_ಠ

I'm watching you...

I played many NES game to death as well and, man, I loved Shovel Knight's graphics. They are extremly detailed and look great.
It would look much worse with something,like Awesomenauts graphics.
Most important thing is that the gameplay is great and it is very enjoyable game. It has everything, good gameplay, beuatiful gprahichs, great soundtrack, good characters, humorous scenes (mostly in Plague of Shadows), everything.
So yes, this game certainly deserves to be higher but as was mentioned previously, it had hard start here, only 1 promo while there were numerous elsewhere. That sale was also only 33% off I think.

Sorry to tell you but from people who didn't grow up during the NES generation and don't find 8-bit retro graphics pretty, they are pretty crappy. When I say "crap" in this particular instance, I mean "Not as good as they could be, since I've moved beyond that to SNES level as min requirement" for myself personally, but for 99% of newer gamers those graphics are indeed crappy. Let's not try to worship retro 8-bit art here, given modern technology artists can do a lot more with modern video hardware than could have been accomplished in the time of the NES so its sad when developers feel the need to go too far back in time. SNES style 16-bit 2D games are timeless because of expanded color pallete to 32,000 colors, way more than the 16 or so colors NES games had to work with.

Terraria, Awesomenauts and that new valley game are more in line where a sizable majority of gamers acceptable limits are.

As for copies sold... Speaking for myself, I didn't buy shovel knight because it just isn't all that interesting if you've played a lot of games. I'd buy it for less than 5$ but nothing more than that.

i don't entirely disagree with you but i don't have the energy to drum out a real response to what has been argued a thousand times in a thousand different topics. sometimes less is more (in the case of shovel knight), and sometimes more leads to less (in the case of the state of the industry as a whole). what i mean is... well, you should try playing games on an xbox one sometime to see where 'more' got us. it's awful.

I don't most games these days don't interest me. Awesomenauts proves that with the right team, more is better. The problem is that the vast majority of developers are not good.

shovel knight is discounted on gog right now

...In (roughly) the past year. An important element to take into account in any back-of-the-envelope calculations. ;)

Indeed. There are is also the fact that the best-selling list only tracks the position of games from 2013 and onward.

They are actually still planning to add more content to the game, like a mode that lets you play as Specter Knight. (I think also a King Knight mode as well.)

Perhaps it would help this game sell here if GOG gave the next free expansion to be released the front page treatment.

The reality is steam is king and people who like platform games are steam/console mostly. People want to get their games in one place and since steam became 'the' game platform for games outside the big budget ones.