Hollow Knight: Silksong was carrying so much hype on its shoulders – eight years worth, to be exact – that when developer Team Cherry finally stepped out of the shadows to give the world a release date, it sent other game making indie teams into a bit of a panic. But Team Cherry kinda feels bad about all the drama; it’s just that they didn’t even know Silksong’s release date until a week or so before we did.
To rewind, Team Cherry announced Silksong’s release date in a long-awaited trailer, two weeks before the game would eventually come out worldwide. What followed was a minor frenzy, as at least eight other indie teams delayed their own games to avoid the inevitable attention vacuum that was Hollow Knight: Silksong.
“To some extent that probably is unfortunate,” Team Cherry’s co-lead Ari Gibson told Bloomberg about the Silksong-induced delays. “Even we felt like we didn’t have a lot of control over our own date because we basically were rushing, rushing, rushing toward the end, working right up until the last point. And then the minute we thought this was ready to release, suddenly we’re releasing it. So it wasn’t a particularly controlled release. We didn’t even know the date until basically a week or two before we put out the trailer. It’s just the snowball, and also the expectations of fans. These people have been waiting five, six years to play the thing.”
Team Cherry’s taking a similar approach with Silksong’s in-development DLC by not really putting a deadline on whatever comes next. It’ll come when it’s ready, basically. The only deadline the team are pressured by is one that we all have to contend with: death.
Silksong is shockingly cheap at just $20, but Team Cherry says it just tries to “price the games at a reasonable level for people,” man