Silksong Announcement - kinda bad?
That Silksong release announcement has made things a bit weird, didn't it?
If you don't already know, the anticipation of Silksong, the sequel to 2017's Hollow Knight, has become a bit of a meme. There's a contingent of overly online people making every games event some kind of referendum on Silksong info, something which has far outstripped the actual popularity of Hollow Knight.
6 years after first announcing Silksong, Team Cherry made a pretty unusual move of giving people only 2 weeks notice, announcing on Aug 21 that the game would be out on Sep 4.
This has created a bit of a splash in the whole indie scene, and caused a number of other games slated for release around then to delay their launches.
I think this is kinda shit.
Splash Damage
I don't necessarily think Team Cherry necessarily assholes for doing this, the weirdly rowdy fan behaviour isn't really directly their fault and this feels in some way a response to that, but they did make a decision that will potentially do a lot of damage to a lot of indie devs.
The sales curve of most games peaks massively at launch, in a way that broadly makes sense - if people who might buy it know about it before launch, they'll probably buy it pretty early.
Indie games can be quite different as they're more likely to develop a following over time, but generally speaking pre-launch interest translates pretty directly into launch sales, and that pre-launch interest is a big factor in getting publisher support and good promotional opportunities.
While it's not as crucial for Indies, it's the most predictable and reliable prelaunch data they have for making budget decisions and the kind of things that will dictate the survival of the developer.
Indie devs have way less flex in their budgets than big studios.
To me this near-shadowdrop release timing just feels inconsiderate considering the guaranteed success of Silksong. No matter what they did, that game is going to make tens of millions of dollars. Hell, doing it this way - a short prerelease period with no preorders - has probably cost them millions with their GamePass agreement in play.
The relative friendliness of the indie market, the support of small devs and lack of competitive ire, is a big part of what gave Hollow Knight its platform in the first place. Ironically, it didn't have a particularly strong launch, but had very strong word of mouth and developed into a behemoth over time. Now that they're not dealing with the precarity of "true" indie dev, they've dropped a nuke on several teams with far less survivability.
I'll be clear, as a videogame enjoyer I wasn't massively impacted by the delays - Demonschool had only settled on a Sep 3 release date this month after previous delays, and within weeks had to push it back another 2 months and I was keen to get into it soon, but I'm not likely to forget to buy it in November. But I'm not the audience that people are going to lose over this.
| Brutal run of headlines
Wrap-up
I think Team Cherry may have brought the little-guy attitude into a big release. Lots of developers never lose the feeling that they're still a scrappy little underdog even when they're huge, and I think it may have crept up on them a little here. I don't think that makes this timing any less thoughtless, just more understandable.
They might be classed as an indie, but with Hollow Knight's success Team Cherry should have the financial standing to release when they choose, not "as soon as it's done" - if they lack that standing, they fucked up.
If they were held to this by contractual obligations, they fucked up with those contracts.
If they weren't confident in a Sep 4 release date until last week, they fucked up as developers.
If they were confident in Sep 4 before August but chose to keep the announcement late, that's a dick move as I hope I've laid out.