Australian developer Team Cherry has said it was “unfortunate” that the release of its eagerly-awaited Hollow Knight: Silksong was disruptive to the launch of other indie games.
Speaking to Bloomberg, the studio’s Ari Gibson said that it was “rushing” towards putting the game, adding that the developers themselves did not know the release date until very shortly before it revealed when the much-awaited Metroidvania was coming out.
“To some extent, that probably is unfortunate,” Gibson told Bloomberg.
“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 announced Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release date two weeks before the game was set to come out. Sustained hype for the game meant other indie developers felt they had to move their releases to stand a chance of getting consumer attention. The creative director of Hell is Us, Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, described the Australian studio’s move as “callous”. Developer Necrosoft moved the release of Demonschool, saying that “Silksong really did take over”.
When the game did release, it was so popular that it briefly took out a number of storefronts, including Steam and the Nintendo eShop, as well as Xbox and PlayStation’s platforms.
“That was surprising,” Team Cherry’s William Pellen said.
“I didn’t even know that could happen. But yeah, we’re really, really happy with people’s reactions to it.”
After its release, Silksong went on to attract a peak of over half a million concurrent users on Steam.
