Hollow Knight Sequel 'Silksong' Crashed Game Stores, as $20 Price Irks Competitors (screenrant.com) 58
Last week Steam and other major storefronts crashed, reports the Guardian, including Nintendo's eShop, PlayStation Store and Microsoft Store. They were all "unable to cope with the demand for Hollow Knight: Silksong, the long-awaited sequel to the critically acclaimed 2017 indie hit Hollow Knight." (which had sold 15 million copies):
SilkSong's release triggered widespread outages, with thousands of users reporting issues trying to buy the game in the first few hours of its release. Many were unable to complete purchases, with error messages persisting for almost three hours after the launch... Despite the technical hiccups, within 30 minutes of going live Steam reported more than 100,000 active players, suggesting many had managed to secure their copies.
Aftermath says the "bug-tastic" phenomenon displaced everything except Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 on Steam's list of most-played games. The Guardian notes that "At least seven other new games have delayed their launch in the past two weeks to avoid a clash..."
"People have been spamming the chat and the comments of every single game showcase or news event with the words 'Where's Silksong?' for years," writes the Guardian's video games editor: I've never seen another indie game achieve this level of notoriety before it was even released... As VGC points out, Atari released a similar game on the same day as Silksong (Adventure of Samsara) and it had only 12 concurrent players on Steam.
They add that "the hype is justified". Eurogame called Silksong "beautiful, thrilling and cruel." PC Game said Silksong "glows with a level of precision and imagination that's hard to find anywhere else" and "will beat you, burn you, rub your face in the dirt, and then dazzle you with another piece of a haunted clockwork world."
But at least some of the demand also came from the game's low price of $20 in the U.S., suggests Slashdot reader UnknowingFool (with variable regional pricing). "At 5.2M wishes, it was the most wish listed game on Steam. In Brazil, the local price was 74.95 Brazil Real or 13.94 USD." In the age of $70+ AAA games with additional costs, not everyone celebrated the consumer friendly price. Some independent game developers have expressed concern that their games may not sell as well compared to Silksong and cannot afford to charge less.
From ScreenRant: Hollow Knight: Silksong's unbelievably low price point of just $19.99 is exceptionally good value for the consumer. It is an incredibly lengthy game that is only marginally more expensive than its predecessor... it is proving to be a source of controversy for other indie developers who believe it will distort players' expectations.
Aftermath says the "bug-tastic" phenomenon displaced everything except Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 on Steam's list of most-played games. The Guardian notes that "At least seven other new games have delayed their launch in the past two weeks to avoid a clash..."
"People have been spamming the chat and the comments of every single game showcase or news event with the words 'Where's Silksong?' for years," writes the Guardian's video games editor: I've never seen another indie game achieve this level of notoriety before it was even released... As VGC points out, Atari released a similar game on the same day as Silksong (Adventure of Samsara) and it had only 12 concurrent players on Steam.
They add that "the hype is justified". Eurogame called Silksong "beautiful, thrilling and cruel." PC Game said Silksong "glows with a level of precision and imagination that's hard to find anywhere else" and "will beat you, burn you, rub your face in the dirt, and then dazzle you with another piece of a haunted clockwork world."
But at least some of the demand also came from the game's low price of $20 in the U.S., suggests Slashdot reader UnknowingFool (with variable regional pricing). "At 5.2M wishes, it was the most wish listed game on Steam. In Brazil, the local price was 74.95 Brazil Real or 13.94 USD." In the age of $70+ AAA games with additional costs, not everyone celebrated the consumer friendly price. Some independent game developers have expressed concern that their games may not sell as well compared to Silksong and cannot afford to charge less.
From ScreenRant: Hollow Knight: Silksong's unbelievably low price point of just $19.99 is exceptionally good value for the consumer. It is an incredibly lengthy game that is only marginally more expensive than its predecessor... it is proving to be a source of controversy for other indie developers who believe it will distort players' expectations.
Well, that's new...I think (Score:5, Interesting)
Video games competing on price. That seems new to me.
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They kinda need to. Some game segments (e.g. anything not mobile/casual) are losing sales. Dev houses are firing people and going out of business. It's rough out there.
Meanwhile Team Cherry had all the time in the world to work on Silksong and can make bank at a price of $20/copy since their dev costs were low-to-non-existent. The entire team that worked on Hollow Knight is already rich enough to retire. They're basically using the same game engine as before (probably).
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Why are their costs so much lower, with no overhead? Are there no other such outfits around?
I don't know much about gaming, other than the big dev houses are making billions.
Re:Well, that's new...I think (Score:4, Insightful)
Team Cherry's core is three guys [teamcherry.com.au]. They pay themselves and some contractors to help out (the list of credits on Hollow Knight was much longer than three guys). In any case it's a small indie shop where they handle the vast majority of the work. Their output is pretty basic 2d stuff. They don't need expensive development systems, voice actors, mocap, extensive engine licenses, etc. They self-publish.
There are plenty of small indie shops that do essentially the same thing, albeit with generally worse results.
Larger dev houses employ hundreds, if not thousands of people to launch one title, usually for the full duration of the development effort.
Re:Well, that's new...I think (Score:4, Informative)
Games vary in effort depending on what you're trying to do. Silksong as a game requires comparatively little effort to other games. It's a 2D scroller, anyone with Inkscape / Illustrator and a bit of creativity can make draw the world. It's a 2D side scrolling map so anyone with a bit of artistic creativity can make the entire world. It's a non-narrated game, so a creative story and a bit of typing on the keyboard rounds out the story. As for the mechanics themselves, they are from a coding perspective completely trivial.
No 3D animation, no massive worlds to design, no highly complex hit box computation in 3D, no netcode, no voice acting, etc. The game relies on having a rich story, and the base mechanics while being some of the simplest of any game are fun enough and present a nice challenge.
Or to understand the difference in simple terms, compare this gameplay footage of Borderlands 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
To the gameplay footage of Silksong https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The difference in effort (cost) should be immediately obvious.
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they don't pay a CEO a ridiculous salary and they haven't gotten stupidly greedy and egotistical, nor have they hired all their useless 'friends' ?
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The game engine is Unity, so... in one sense you're absolutely correct and in another there's been a 3rd party team developing it in the background the whole time.
The comparison isn't even, but it's not like triple A games ever ship without a large amount of middleware these days.
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Unity makes it easy, yes. But they pay for that and apparently it's well within their budget (just as it was for Hollow Knight when they weren't necessarily rolling in dough already).
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I see.
So I guess the question then becomes, if there is so much "bank" to be made in that segment, why are other dev houses not pursuing that segment? Or are they, and they're not not successful with it, and if so, why not?
It sounds a lot like a South Park, or Family Guy, Beavis & Butthead or similar type situation. The animation and graphics of those shows are just HORRIBLE, compared to stuff from Disney or Pixar. But "animation houses" are competing in that market and making bank. Is that not happeni
Re: Well, that's new...I think (Score:3)
The trick is that to compete in that segment you need to nail the gameplay. Nailing the gameplay is something much harder to pin down and understand than whether it looks pretty. While itâ(TM)s much cheeper to release a good game in this segment *if* you nail the good game part, itâ(TM)s very unreliable as a source of income if you havenâ(TM)t nailed it yet.
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It's a combination of crisp movement controls and great level design. That's where Team Cherry really shines.
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There are a lot of competitors in the space. For whatever reason, Hollow Knight was a real winner, and that drove anticipation for Silksong.
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There are huge numbers of indie games produced on low budgets being released every day. Most of them barely get any sales. The barrier to producing games is lower than it's ever been, but most of the games aren't that good because it turns out making good games is an art that few have mastered.
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All:
Very interesting comments from anyone. Thank you for your insights.
I'm not a hard core gamer, so I don't k ow much about modern gaming. I'm an old school guy who was always more interested in pinball than video games.
If it gets much more complicated that Pac-Man or Missile Command, I'm out. All these third party shooter games are way way way too fast moving and complicated to me. I don't see how you people do it.
One game I've been playing lately that I really like is called "tint" - I play it on my iPho
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New because Big Business bought up the independents and now control the market and like all controlled markets, they raised prices and lowered wages. The rich get needlessly richer by cheating and stealing from the rest of us. This is what classism looks like.
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I don't usually enjoy MOBA style games, competitive shooters, platformers, or other games where you do the same thing over and over again in the same play area/map. Silksong and Hollow Knight fit into this category - not my type of game at all, whether they're free or $20 or $100
I do enjoy space sims (e.g. Elite Dangerous), flight sims, online sim racing, factory builder games (e.g. Satisfactory).
Protect your install (Score:4, Informative)
I have an offline installation of Silksong from GoG, and I don't have to patch it if I don't want to. Allegedly Team Cherry has decided to make the game a little easier by changing how many enemies can do additional damage and by lowering prices on shop items (among other things). Not sure if they're gonna lock these changes behind an "easy mode" or if the base game will be affected, but those of us who have no need to patch the game will never see those changes.
The game runs flawlessly and doesn't crash or bug out (well, unless it's supposed to because . . . everything's an insect or slug or arachnid or whatever), so there's no immediate need for a patch to make it run.
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Chances are they'll put out a half dozen dlc packs (for free) and transform parts of the story in the process. That's how it was with the first one anyway.
At that point it'll still be up to you if you wanna update it, of course.
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Yeah, eventually there will be DLC. And at that point I'll have to patch it. Not sure if the difficulty changes are really that notable since it (apparently) doesn't change real fuck-you bosses like the Act 1 boss.
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Gathering rosaries is not hard, it's a time sink. Which wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the items ONLY gave you advantages, but many of them are necessary for 100% completion, and to reach the true ending and secret endings of the game.
If you're into that (Score:3)
"will beat you, burn you, rub your face in the dirt, and then dazzle you with another piece of a haunted clockwork world."
That is exactly what I am into, getting beaten, burned, and my face rubbed in the dirt. I see why people like this.
Priced too cheap - boo hoo hoo (Score:3, Interesting)
Its predecessor "Hollow Knight" sold 15 million copies, mostly at a similar price ($20), which adds up to a total revenue of $300M. Indie games aren't supposed to cost $70 a time. $20 is low enough that a casual gamer like me will drop $20 to see what the fuss is about.
Denuvo, accounts, and always online (Score:5, Interesting)
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Silksong sold on GoG day one with no DRM at all. Love to see it.
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I mean I get it, paying $70 for a AAA game with DLC's and a battle pass is outrageous. [/quote]Yeah, I dunno. I bought an entire PS2 system and GTA: Vice City for the sole purpose of playing Vice City. It's the only game I ever had for it. Eventually, I finished Vice City and that was the end of my console gaming "career".
So what was my effective cost for Vice City? I don't remember for sure, but it had to be a few hundred bucks.
It seems to ME that paying $70 for a top tier game could be very reasonable. At $5/hr (my personal arbitrary rate for the value media-based entertainment), that's a playing time of 14 hours. So, if I get 14 hours or more playing time out of a title, it's "worth it" in my book. I don't know how many hours of playing time you get out of a top tier game these days, but I know I spent a fuckload more than 14 hours of time playing Vice City.
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I probably would pay $100+ for a game that I consider interesting and $250 for a ground-breaking title (Skyrim, etc.).
Todd Howard loved that.
I think even the idea of dropping $250 for a video game is absolutely bonkers, and calling Skyrim "ground-breaking" is being vastly too generous. The only reason Skyrim has had the staying power it has is (1) modders and (2) Bethesda's inability to release more than 1 game every 5-6 years, leading to 10-12 years between each franchise game.
I get the point... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a run to the bottom with people on prices. I mean I get it, paying $70 for a AAA game with DLC's and a battle pass is outrageous. Paying full price for No Man Sky is worth it only because its been out 10 years and you know your going to spend the hours in it. But what about the guy who makes a decent 2D game, not as good as SilkSong, but passable with a good 20 hours of play? You cannot even judge your enjoyment by price either. Look at Undertale. Its not the kind of game for everyone, yet its loved by those who grok it. On the other hand, SilkSong took 7 years and after a few months the hype will die out. They made enough on the last game they could take their time and not worry about the profits.
Meh I am just confused on what I should or shouldn't pay now. You got Steam sales, thousands of games in the market, great gems with like 20 reviews because they were never featured yet want $30 bucks. It's a mad house I tell you.
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I don't think you understand "Entertainment".
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The #1 question when buying a game is whether it's worth your time. Only if that answer is yes, does the price matter. There are a lot of games out there, so a game must either be really good or do something unique to stand out. A metroidvania that's just okay isn't going to be successful commercially, no matter what it's priced at; the competition is just too stiff.
I don't think the $20 price point matters much for the competition. People into this genre are going to play Silksong first and only look for o
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Some people are going to try to get Silksong done in under 20 hours (actually in under 10 hours), but if you're looking to 100% it then you'll get more than 20 hours of play out of it.
That aside, there is (or needs to be) a correction in PC and console game prices. Growth in those sectors has tapered off while mobile gaming has become enormous. AAA publishers seem to think that their titles should rival something like Candy Crush or Roblox when it comes to revenue. It can't always be like that. In terms
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This is a run to the bottom with people on prices.
No it's not, it's a reflection of the fact that games do not all have an equal cost of production, and hopefully this FINALLY gets it through the thick skulls of studio execs that an interesting original story with fun gameplay mechanics is orders of magnitude more important than wanky hyperrealistic 3D graphics.
player expectations NEED to be distorted. (Score:5, Interesting)
"it is proving to be a source of controversy for other indie developers who believe it will distort players' expectations"
GOOD
$100+DLC+lootboxes+pay-to-win should NOT be normal player expectations.
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Other INDIE devs. Indie devs aren't charging $100 + loot boxes. Team Cherry are in the unique position of being like 3 guys whose previous game blew up and are basically guaranteed to sell 10M+ copies of the sequel. They can afford to spend 7 years on Silksong and then sell it for $20.
Other teams that aren't already set for life are worried because they will need to charge more for smaller, less polished games in order to afford to eat.
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Okay but why is a small indie dev putting themselves in the position where their entire livelihood is affected by what they can charge for their Unity (or whatever) project?
Admittedly, the indie space is much more crowded than it was back in ~2010 or so. Getting a good Kickstarter together to launch your first (or next) title is nowhere near as easy as it used to be. But most indie devs should have a side hustle or some other stream of revenue if they find themselves in a position where they've got to cha
Re: player expectations NEED to be distorted. (Score:2)
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And that's the problem. Why aren't they working part time at McDonald's (or similar)? Look at the bio for the three guys still in Team Cherry (there was a fourth). They all had some kind of industry experience. They all had day jobs (of a sort). Working on an indie title was something they did when not bringing home the bacon at the day job. They met at game jams and worked together for years on other stuff (like Hungry Knight) before finally launching something worth selling.
If you absolutely have to
Re:player expectations NEED to be distorted. (Score:4, Insightful)
No indie is charging that. That's part of the appeal already.
If anyone is upset about this, it's triple A publishers... but not because Silksong is successful. Just because they have launched so many major entries into major franchises that have absolutely flopped over the last few years. They're just looking for a reason why their formula isn't as popular as the expect while they rely on the majority of the market being naive about their practices.
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"it is proving to be a source of controversy for other indie developers who believe it will distort players' expectations"
GOOD
$100+DLC+lootboxes+pay-to-win should NOT be normal player expectations.
And only 6 hours of gameplay.
That's the normal console expectation.
I don't own a console any more. Last one was a Wii. Thought about a Switch 2 but not with the way Nintendo have been acting.
In the Glorious PCGMR good indie games like this are commonplace and usually go for £/$20-30. I bought Captain of Industry last week and it's like electronic crack, same with Schedule 1 and both of these games are still being developed and updated with new content. Last AAA game I bought was WH40K Space M
Just do like EA (Score:3)
So EA just went to the NFL and paid them for an exclusive deal and we have not had another NFL football game besides Madden since.
Gabe isn't going to live forever. When he dies steam is at a high risk of being sold to somebody like EA. A benevolent King is still a king.
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Newell has nothing to do with this, Silksong is available on GoG. Props to Team Cherry for selling it there on launch day.
Yeah but the majority of sales are steam (Score:2)
But remember, CD project red loses money on GOG. All it would take for God to go away is for their next big game that funds GOG to flop. Cyberpunk almost flopped but they did manage to fix it.
It's an extremely high risk high reward business model. Konami gave up on it for just that reason
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A benevolent King is still a king.
Most of the time, you make sense. This is one of them. (sometimes you don't, badly)
So to clarify (Score:2)
But when he dies we have no idea what's going to happen to Steam when somebody else takes over.
If you look at the history of countries that have King
IDK where this narrative comes from (Score:3)
Indie game devs already expect their games to be unnoticed by the vast majority. They don't tend to get mad about another indie's success.
This seems like a narrative that is just being pushed by people unfamiliar with the culture.
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There are actually some indie devs bitching on Bluesky etc. It's kinda weird.
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The only thing I've seen so far is journalists talk about it in hype-building tones... you know, as if they expected it to engage an audience with the drama.
I know there are a bunch of delayed releases due to it, but that's not the same thing as people hating on it... But I'm looking at an IGN article now and comparing it to the actual text of one of the conversations they cited as evidence that people are mad, and they had to spin several developers saying that the game is good value into complaints about
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There are articles and vids out there with X and BlueSky post screenshots.
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Fair enough. I feel like that's pretty much the kind of thing i'm skeptical of though.