Although Hollow Knight: Silksong has been one of the biggest game launches of the year a reader has decided not to get it, because of the actions of developer Team Cherry.
It’s hard to miss the hype for Hollow Knight: Silksong this week but I’ve got to say that the more I hear about it the less I’m interested. I haven’t played the original, but I can’t see anything in any of the reviews I’ve read this week that make it sound like anything more than a competent Metroidvania.
I haven’t played it though, so I was interested in giving Silksong a go and understanding why people love it. That was until I started to get put off by everything that developer Team Cherry was doing. If they were a big publisher like EA or Activision everyone would be hurling abuse at them and drawing up petitions, but for some reason they seem to have been given a free pass to act however they want.
I get that they’re a very small team, but I would’ve thought that would make them sympathetic towards fellow indie developers, but apparently not. They announced the release date for Silksong just two weeks ago, right in the middle of a busy week for new games and didn’t care at all what that was going to do to all the other games whose parade they just rained on.
It’s not like there were any big publisher games out this week, just indie stuff and double-A games like Hell Is Us and Cronos: The New Dawn. Games which are now going to do considerably worse than they would’ve, just because Team Cherry didn’t give any warning that Silksong was coming out when it did.
I get that Team Cherry wanted a lot of hype for their game, and a surprise release date did that. But so do all the stories about other indie games having to get out of their way, which only benefited them. Why didn’t they just choose next week, when there’s hardly anything out?
They can look up the release schedules just as easily as I can, so the only assumption is that they wanted to ruin things for others, just to get more publicity for themselves. That’s capitalism I guess, but not what I’d expect from an indie developer.
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Then they said they wouldn’t send out review copies to anyone because they didn’t want reviewers playing the game first. Even though that’s their job and now we have no idea what the game is like before we buy it, which puts Silksong in the same boat as such celebrated classics as Starfield and Suicide Squad.
That also generated lots of news stories and then on the day of release, because they wouldn’t allowing pre-loading all the shop sites broke down for an hour or so, making it impossible to buy or download the game. Which was yet more free publicity for Team Cherry and their game.
I’m sure that’s all very clever from a marketing perspective but it’s not the sort of thing I expect from a plucky five-man team (or whatever it is) toiling away as bedroom programmers. I’m pretty sure they could’ve generated just as much hype without ruining things for others and being super cynical about how they handled the launch.
I imagine EA and Activision were probably quite idealistic and enthusiastic when they first started out, and they just evolved into the evil entities we know today over time. If Team Cherry are acting like this when they’re still a tiny company I can only hope they don’t become bigger, because I can’t remember the last time the actions, and general vibe, from a company put me off buying a game as much as this.
By reader Gaston
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