The announcement of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release date of September 4, 2025, delivered in a brief trailer two weeks ago, was amazing, celebratory news for Silksong fans who had been waiting for such news for over six years.
But it was a far less celebratory day for the developers of around 10 other video games with existing marketing plans to launch right around that same time.
In the ensuing weeks, the list of games that have moved their release dates for Silksong has only grown longer as developers reconfigure marketing plans and find new dates that work. As of this piece’s publication, that list includes Demonschool, Aeterna Lucis, Little Witch in the Woods, CloverPit, Megabonk, Baby Steps, Faeland, Starbirds, and Moros Protocol. Even Stomp and the Sword of Miracles, an indie game with no release date plans anywhere in sight, elected to delay its Kickstarter launch and demo release due to Silksong.
But is it actually the right decision to move a smaller game out of the way of a bigger one? What if your small game is so different from the big game that you could stand to set up a Barbenheimer situation? What if GTA 6 stealth launches tomorrow?
Both GTA and Silksong have prompted plenty of discussion this year about what devs can and should do when their game suddenly shares a release date with a juggernaut. So I asked a couple of experts about the thought process behind setting and moving release dates, and what they think the right choice is when GTA 6, Silksong, or another marketing monster drops into your launch window unexpectedly.
Why Delay?
Just deciding on a video game’s release date in the first place can be one heck of a puzzle, I’m told. The game has to be ready, for starters, it has to be able to make it through the complex platform certification process. You have to make sure, if you’re a publisher with multiple games, that none of those games are stepping on one another’s toes. You want to avoid seasonal sales on storefronts like Steam, because you won’t get visibility during that time. You want to speak with platform partners to ensure the time makes sense for them. And you have to deal with all sorts of other factors: maybe a developer is going on vacation a week you want to release and need them to be there for bug fixes. Maybe someone on the team is getting married. Maybe the developer just really likes Tuesdays!
So with all that work put into just finding a date in the first place, moving to an entirely different date sounds like a terrible idea, right? Well, Adam Lieb says it often is. Lieb is the CEO of marketing platform Gamesight. A big part of Lieb’s job is to work together with developers and publishers to plan marketing around their games, and he tells me he’s worked on over a thousand different games in the last five years, largely on PC and console.
Which all means that Lieb, as a part of his job, makes recommendations on when publishers and developers should release their games. And while there are many factors to consider, including competition, Lieb says he doesn’t always advise devs to delay if a big game appears in their existing launch window. Why? Simply put, delays are expensive.
“The most boring business reason is that every day your game is ready to launch, and you don’t launch it, it’s costing you money,” he says. “The game is ready. You could be generating revenue on that game… If it’s going to be the difference between game success and failure, of course you should always do it, but when that’s not the case, you’re just talking about wasting a bunch of costs that you shouldn’t be spending to push something like three months.”
But pure cost isn’t the only reason Lieb doesn’t always advise moving games. He tells me that a lot of the conventional wisdom for why someone might move a game out of another game’s launch window doesn’t apply in every case. For instance, is it a good idea to release an indie platformer shortly after Silksong comes out? You’d think it’s not, but Lieb proposes something different:
“If you have an indie platformer, a great time to launch it is probably, I don’t know, two to six weeks after Silksong comes out. You’ve got probably a brand new audience that’s playing that style game either for the first time, because it’s a huge game, or they haven’t played it in a long time, or it’s their favorite genre, it doesn’t really matter. You’ve got more people playing indie platformers during that time. [Silksong] probably doesn’t have a thousand hours of content. People are going to play it for 20 to 40 hours, or something like that. Then they’re going to be looking for the next game to play. So, if you have a game that is in the same space, you actually do kind of want to be around their launch window, maybe even before.”
As an example, Lieb mentions the original Splitgate, which he recalls came out right before a big Halo update and benefitted from Halo fans excited about the update and wanting to play something like it right away. We also discuss The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered’s shadow-drop earlier this year, and its launch extremely close to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Both games are RPGs, yet both sold well — perhaps, Lieb suggests, in part because excitement for one fed directly into interest in the other.
Analyzing those close comparisons is another big part of Lieb’s job. When working with a game, he looks at data to determine what other games players “index” for, so that developers can avoid competition or, alternatively, play off interest. For instance, if Gamesight was working on Borderlands 4 (hypothetically — Lieb and I did not discuss this particular game at all), he might look at what games players of Borderlands 3 also played around the same time, and then advise Gearbox to steer clear of any sequels or similar releases with Borderlands 4. And sometimes, games that index high are not what you’d expect, such as Palworld players indexing highly for Helldivers 2, or are driven more by content creator trends than similar genres or gameplay or anything else.
“Lies of P did so much better in the post-Elden Ring world because there was this huge influx of Souls players, and then they came off of it, it was almost like a warm audience, and then there’s a new game in the genre,” Lieb shares as an example. “People were hungry for more of that type of game, and then that type of game appears, and it was actually great for them.”
Getting Out of the Way, and Getting Over It
Lieb provides me with compelling reasons why delaying a game may not always be the best idea, even if GTA 6 is approaching rapidly in your rear view mirror. But Nigel Lowrie, co-founder of Devolver Digital, which is publishing Silksong-delayed Baby Steps, had a more breezy take on delaying.
Lowrie says he walked into 2025 fully prepared to delay Baby Steps or whatever else if he needed to; GTA in particular was “blinding” as he looked at the calendar ahead — at least until it was delayed to 2026. And Silksong wasn’t the only indie game of concern, either. He was wary of Deltarune, and continues to keep an eye on ConcernedApe’s The Haunted Chocolatier.
But Silksong, he continues, was different. Silksong trended on social media during publisher showcases it wasn’t even in. He calls it a “cultural moment,” saying that the marketing itself is effectively part of the experience of the game.
“People do enjoy Death Stranding 2,” Lowrie says. “But people spent probably more time or just as much time engaging with the marketing and promotion of Death Stranding 2 than they did [playing Death Stranding 2.] And there’s that sense of, that’s part of the experience in a lot of ways. We’d likened it to Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones was this cultural moment and everyone watched Game of Thrones for an hour every week or whatever when it was on. But when I look back on my experience, I know my wife and I, we’d get in bed immediately and just speculate about next week. And it sounds silly, but really, we spent a lot of time engaged with that series or these games through speculation, hype, promotion… I’m not saying it’s just as fun as playing the actual game, but it is part of the experience. And so you have to be mindful of those kinds of things too, when games reach that level people love talking about it along with actually playing the game.”
With the prospect of massive games like Silksong or GTA always ready to disrupt a calendar, Lowrie says he ensures he’s always ready to move a game. So when Silksong’s trailer hit, he chatted with the developers of Baby Steps — Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy — to see how they felt. They looked at how many people watched the Silksong trailer or were even just in the queue ahead of time, waiting for it to start. “That many people with a little video that was a minute and a half long, everyone assumed it had to be the release date, that’s the only reason it would make that big a stink, and there were like hundreds of thousands of people waiting for it to start and you’re like, that’s important.”
The group came to the conclusion that Baby Steps could move, and so it did. He says he’s seen criticism online from those who think Baby Steps, or other games, should not have moved. But Lowrie says it’s different when it’s your game that your livelihood depends on. “You can’t AB test reality,” he says. “Maybe Baby Steps would’ve just been fine September 8, it could have been. But am I willing to risk this team’s livelihood and the future of the game they’ve worked on for five years to see if they both work out? I’m not. And I also want to listen to what they want, and what they want is to have their own spotlight and I couldn’t agree more.”
And for what it’s worth, Lieb agrees. Though he gave me many reasons not to delay a game, he also acknowledged there were many reasons to delay when GTA 6 or Silksong comes knocking, and the need to be in a media “spotlight” was one of them. There are only so many hours in the day, he says, and if every content creator is covering Silksong or GTA, your game is out of luck. “The day GTA comes out, all you can do is write stories about GTA because that’s what people want to read about,” he says. “There might be content creators that love your game, and wish they could play it on launch day, but sorry, dude, can’t.”
GTA 6, the juggernaut
Silksong, both Lowrie and Lieb agree, is a big deal, and unique in the way it’s captured and consumed a massive portion of the gaming audience. But GTA 6, they said, was on another level even further beyond that. “I mean, there are AAA games and then there’s AAAA games and I’d argue that Grand Theft Auto is potentially the AAAAA game, it’s just bigger than anything else both in the scope and scale of the game and the kind of cultural impact that it has and the attention it demands,” Lowrie says. Lieb’s take is similar: “I would say that GTA for the last year and a half has been a part of almost every conversation around launch dates I have heard.”
Lieb adds that GTA 6 is so massive it’s impacting release date conversations even in genres far outside of what you’d normally consider GTA competition. “What’s funny with GTA is, because we do a lot of genre analysis comparisons because of the RP servers, there ends up being almost every type [of game]. Someone’s built a horror GTA RP server or whatever, so that competes with Silent Hill somehow. And you obviously take that with a little bit of grain of salt, but the scope of that game is so large that it ends up competing with stuff that it otherwise wouldn’t. Almost every other game, if you’re a shooter, you don’t care a lot about other things besides shooters. There are some things you maybe should be slightly cognizant of, but generally if you’re a FPS, that’s the genre you care about. But GTA has been this little bit of a black cloud that looms kind of over everything. So, that, I think, has caused people to be more hesitant with dates.”
Which is why, both he and Lowrie tell me, so many developers and publishers steered clear of fall 2025 when they thought GTA 6 was releasing then. Once it moved, suddenly that period was safe again, and it filled up with releases. But we should expect everyone to give May 26, 2026 a wide berth. How wide, I ask Lowrie? He doesn’t know exactly just yet, though he says GTA 6’s ability to not need months upon months of aggressive marketing is helpful — none of his games are likely to cross streams with any big GTA 6 gameplay trailers or events. It’s just the release date that’s scary.
I ask both of them about a Barbenheimer scenario or, more applicable to video games, a Doom/Animal Crossing scenario. Is there a game that could release alongside GTA 6 and succeed by virtue of being incredibly different? Neither of them are confident it could, and Lieb in particular says it’s a bad idea to risk it.
“The problem is if you are the head of marketing, head of publishing, whoever’s trying to make this decision with the larger team, and you’ve got to put together a PowerPoint presentation that says our game is launching the same date, everyone’s going to be like, ‘You’re crazy.’ It doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea, it just means it’s super high risk, and it’s going to be hard to get everyone to be on board, because if you’re wrong, and it does blot out the sun, and no one’s talking about any other games. No journalists are writing about any other games. No creators are creating content for any other games. And you look back, that’s a career-defining bad decision.”
GTA 6’s date is set now (as far as we know), so hopefully Lowrie and other developers and publishers won’t have to deal with any more surprises on the release date front for a while (at least until The Haunted Chocolatier and Hades 2 v1.0 get dates). But I do finish up by asking Lowrie what he recommends developers do when a massive game suddenly descends upon them, upending all their carefully-laid marketing plans. Lowrie notes that there are so many games coming out now, you’re almost guaranteed to share a release date with someone. And if it’s someone big, he prefers addressing it with both humor, and humility.
“It’s cool to know your place in the food chain and embrace it, it’s fine. I am very proud of Devolver, but we know that we’re not about to go up against juggernaut, GTA 6 or whatever, so just have fun with it.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
