Hollow Knight: Silksong Finally Releases To Public

On September 4, the independent development group Team Cherry released the sequel to their proclaimed video game Hollow Knight called Hollow Knight: Silksong. Two weeks before this, Team Cherry announced Silksong’s release date and price ($20) after roughly seven years of silence to their community.

This surprising announcement had caused multiple controversies with other independent developers who had planned to release their games around a similar time. For instance, multiple of these developers with smaller games had also initially priced their games at $20, but due to Silksong’s quality and its amount of content at the same price, they were led to believe that their game was no longer worth the price they were asking for. One of these developers proclaimed, “As a dev making a smaller Metroidvania than Silksong, which I originally thought would be fairly priced at 20 USD… what should I price it now? … it was made by one person with limited dev time and funds, I can’t afford to give it away for free.”

The short window between the release of Silksong’s trailer and the actual release date of the game also sparked controversy. Multiple developers were forced to postpone their own updates or game releases out of fear that Silksong’s release would overshadow their games into obscurity.

Certain developers even directly addressed this, calling out Team Cherry for releasing one of the most anticipated games of all time only two weeks after they had revealed its trailer. One example of this is from a small indie game called A Few Quick Matches, which was supposed to release an update around Silksong’s release date, but had to delay it by a week due to evidence showing that their playercounts dropped around Silksong’s announcement and the days leading up to its release.

Overall, many claim the reactions from these developers are justified, as they obviously would want to maximize their players and their profits. But what do large surprise releases like Silksong signify for the gaming industry as a whole? Do they help smaller developers adapt their own projects to the new industry standard? Or do they damage the developing community by raising player’s expectations and overshadowing other developers' releases?

John F. Kennedy High School’s students’ opinions on Hollow Night: Silksong are generally positive. “Silksong is a great game and a huge step of improvement from Hollow Knight,” Luis Miguel Cuevas (12) stated. “The movement is good and the jump in difficulty of Silksong is good.”

Other students such as Lennon Ward (9) had slightly different opinions but still enjoy the game overall. Ward mentioned, “The combat is very interesting and difficult, a lot more difficult than Hollow Knight. The fact that most enemies deal two damage makes me mad, the exploration is kind of wonky [and there are] a lot of hidden walls. Other than that, the game is very fun… and the lore is amazing.”

Photo from Unsplash | Hollow Knight: Silksong arrived after periods of anticipation.