Silksongs

Here’s a complaint I never thought I’d hear: Hollow Knight Silksong is too cheap.

Team Cherry announced the $19.99/€19.99/¥2300 price alongside Silksong’s 4th September release date (that’s today!) only a couple of weeks ago. No other regional pricing was announced, such as how much it’ll cost in the UK, but I expect we’re looking at £19.99 because that’s how these things usually settle here. That price makes Silksong more expensive than Hollow Knight, which cost around £11-13 across various platforms, but not much more expensive, and it’s nowhere near the £50-70 price associated with triple-A games. So, what’s the problem?

Apparently it’s too little – too cheap. Scores of comments on Bluesky and X, in reaction to Silksong’s date and price announcement, say as much. “Actually underpriced,” said one user on Bluesky. “You guys are nuts for this at $20,” said another. And, “You’re going to spawn a week of discourse with that price announcement, you know that?” said another. Oops, ignore that last one.

Broadly it’s lighthearted – most people are pleased Silksong is €20 and not more. Some people are threatening to buy multiple copies, even, which probably defeats the point. But underneath the giddy excitement there is a more serious discussion happening. Comments from worried indie developers show there is concern about the knock-on effects a price like this could have.

“Silksong honestly should cost 40 bucks and I’m not even joking,” posted developer RJ Lake, who worked as a composer on I Am Your Beast and is directing rhythm adventure Unbeatable. “I won’t go as far as to say it’s bad but it will have effects, and not all of those effects are good.”

Who will play Silksong first – Zoe or you? Watch on YouTube

RJ believes Silksong’s price will distort players’ views about what a €20/$20 indie game can and perhaps should offer. Which other indie teams can afford to take several years to make a game, after all? Similarly, if they did take that long, which teams could afford to ask only $20/€20 upon release? Would it cover all that work? Not everyone has the diamond-encrusted safety net that Hollow Knight provides.

Theoretical concerns turned into real concerns not long after, when an indie developer who had been planning to charge $20 for their game took to X to ask people what they should charge now – now that Silksong was doing the same. “I can’t afford to give it away for free,” they – BastiArtGames, developer of Lone Fungus – said. Hearteningly, most of the replies I read – there are more than 1000 – encouraged BastiArtGames to stick to their original price. But as with the games hurriedly moving their releases away from Silksong, Lone Fungus seemed to be far from the only indie game affected.

Toukana, the developer of successful and wonderful tile-laying puzzle game Dorfromantik, delayed the release of new game Star Birds because of Silksong, moving from 4th September to 10th September. And co-founder Zwi Zausch now tells me the game’s as yet unannounced price has been affected too.

“Yes, Silksong’s price has influenced our decision,” Zausch says. “We’re trying not to compete too directly with Silksong, both in terms of release date and pricing. Of course, these are two very different games with potentially different player bases, but there’s definitely some overlap. That makes things tricky, especially since Star Birds is a joint project between two studios, together employing more people than Team Cherry.”

Team Cherry has four core team members, incidentally, which includes the two co-founders, and it uses some contracted help.

But even companies as robust as Devolver have felt the presence of Silksong. The publisher was one of the first to move the release of its game Baby Steps out of the way (from 8th September to 23rd September). “We felt that the same media and influencers who would be drawn to Baby Steps would inevitably (and understandably) prioritise Silksong, and we felt that would overshadow the glory of Nate falling down the side of a mountain,” Devolver CEO and co-founder Graeme Struthers explains to me.

Tellingly, perhaps, the price of Baby Steps hasn’t been announced yet. Struthers didn’t say this was because of Silksong, but he did suggest Silksong was causing questions to be asked. “My general take is that indie games tend to err on the side of value for the gamer,” he says. “I think the triple-A world has had much more to say about price-points and value, but maybe Team Cherry has brought that conversation over this way.”

Mike Rose, founder of indie publisher No More Robots, says pricing is a fascinating and tricky thing to manage. He’d long been an advocate for higher prices, he tells me, because it leaves room for discounts and down-pricing as a game ages. “But recently,” he adds, “I think the economy of games has been shifting, and people who aren’t actually releasing games don’t see it [or] realise.

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“People have less money now and are buying fewer games,” Rose says, “so you have to set yourself up to hopefully be that one game they buy when they do have money. And if you are a higher price, it’s now actually a bit offputting.” Budget co-op climbing sensation Peak is a great example of things going the other way, he says. “Part of the reason that game did so well was the crazy low price. It’s definitely making us rethink the pricing for our upcoming games.”

One game which shares a lot of similarities with Silksong is Citizen Sleeper 2. It’s not because of the game’s content – Citizen Sleeper 2 is a sci-fi role-playing game – but because both games were built on the extraordinary success of a predecessor, both are made by very small teams (Citizen Sleeper is just Gareth Damian Martin, with contracted art and soundtrack help), and both have very similar prices. In fact, the jump from the original game to the sequel is also almost identical.

Damian Martin tells me there were “extensive” discussions about Citizen Sleeper 2’s price, and it jumped from around £16.50 to £21 to reflect it being a bigger game, to account for inflation, and because of how other games were currently priced. All things I’m sure Team Cherry has taken into account when pricing Silksong 2. But there wasn’t any negativity around Citizen Sleeper 2’s price when it launched earlier this year – not that Damian Martin noticed.

“I don’t think most people notice the price unless it is really out of step with the market,” Damian Martin tells me. “That doesn’t mean people don’t make buying decisions based on price, they obviously do, but I think they do that without judgment or comment. They just decide to buy or not, they don’t complain unless there’s a big disparity.

“No matter how big Silksong is,” they added, “I don’t think it can really affect the going rate for indies. It’s just one data point, you’d need hundreds of indies to offer massive amounts of content for a low price to shift the market. It especially feels like conjecture when we don’t even know how big the game is anyway!”

Unprecedented. So much about Silksong feels unprecedented to me. Has there ever been an indie game this anticipated? Has an indie game ever disrupted release schedules in this way, or upended pricing plans? Here’s a game being treated like the biggest of triple-A blockbusters, except it’s not, and I think that’s where some of the pricing confusion arises from. “That’s why people think the price is low compared to the triple-A games that sell for 80 bucks,” says Bram van Lith, co-founder of Game Drive.nl, a company which helps indie devs price and sell their games. Hype has warped perceptions of what Silksong actually is.

But the question remains: is Silksong too cheap? Perhaps a keener question to ask is how much the people I speak to would charge for it, were it their game. Van Lith’s colleague Alisa Jefimova, a market analyst and expert in pricing, would charge €25, she tells me, to give room for a launch discount. Not that they need the attention of a discount, she adds. “It’s gonna be popular no matter what,” she says.

“They definitely could have gone $25,” No More Robots’ Mike Rose agrees, “but this way they are essentially cementing Silksong as being a gigantic success before it even launches, by making it a steal. So I don’t think Team Cherry is wrong to go $20. If I had been pricing it personally, I would have been on the fence between $20 and $25. But given the state of the industry right now, it’s very possible I would have also fallen on $20.”

“The more interesting question,” Bram van Lith chimes in, “is would the game be more successful asking $20 or $30?” What he means is would Silksong make more money if it sold at a higher price-point, or will the extra quantity it sells at a lower price-point more than make up for it? It’s an interesting question, but it’s not something I think Team Cherry is primarily concerned about.

Again, Team Cherry doesn’t depend solely, wholly and entirely upon Silksong’s success. Far from it. Hollow Knight has sold an astronomical 15 million copies already, and the overwhelming majority since Silksong was announced in 2019, curiously enough. Financially, Team Cherry is fine even without Silksong. Financially, Team Cherry is made.

A far more important consideration for Team Cherry is audience reaction. To wheel out an old cliché, this is the Australian studio’s difficult second album, the game that follows the phenomenal success of Hollow Knight. The intense spotlight beam of expectation and hype can be withering. And the elongated wait for Silksong hasn’t helped. Dipping the price slightly below expectations is a powerful way to prime people towards positivity.

Will it work? As Damian Martin noted: so much remains conjecture until the game itself arrives, which it is now agonisingly close to doing – Silksong unlocks at 3pm UK time today. How big will it be? How historic a gaming moment are we about to witness? And will it be worth the wait? Time will tell. We’ll have to wait and see.

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