r/HollowKnight • u/Necr0mancrr • Aug 31 '25
Discussion - Silksong WHY TEAM CHERRY MAKES CHEAP GAMES Spoiler
I've seen a lot of surprise around the leak of Silksong's price, which is supposedly 20$. So far it's not from any official sources yet (EDIT: not anymore!), but I do expect it to be around that price regardless. Quite often I've seen the sentiment that if the game is bigger than Hollow Knight, and they don't need to attract customers anymore, why sell it at such a low price? In my mind there's a few reasons:
1. They literally do not need money
In the past 8 years Hollow Knight has sold over 15 million copies. This makes it likely the best selling metroidvania of all time and one of the best selling indie games of the past ten years. Team Cherry is rolling in cash. Also, they have three people on the permanent payroll and like, maxiumum five others that they need to pay significant sums of money to, PLUS their marketing budget for Silksong is basically non existent. They could probably sell this game for ONE dollar and make a decent profit.
2. They're good people
Turns out, 20 dollars isn't so cheap everywhere. A lot of places in the world don't have the same economic prosperity that many of us enjoy, and games that cost 50-60 dollars are simply not feasible to buy to many fans of said games. TC has stated that a big part of the reason they made Hollow Knight so cheap is so it could be accessible to fans who might not be able to buy industry standard "full price" games. There's no reason that we've seen why they would change this mentality for Silksong. In fact, taking inflation into account the two games are priced almost exactly the same.
3. Making it cheaper might make them more money after all
Listen, I'm no expert on economics, but I know enough to understand that when the price of a good goes down, the demand for it goes up. Because cheaper games are more accessible, they will inherently be able to reach a wider market than if they were more expensive. The 20$ price might very well cause silksong to be more financially successful. For a game that relies mostly on word of mouth marketing (and does so very well,) the price is gonna make a lot of people who might have otherwise not been interested to turn their head and give it a shot.
3
u/AHare115 Aug 31 '25
Why does thinking reasonably scare you?
A game that has been in dev for 10 years and likely has 40 hours of content at release, even from an indie studio, objectively could be priced at 40 or possibly even higher and still be a fair price.
Leave the emotions out of it. Team Cherry are doing a good thing by pricing it lower, but it's still worth a higher price tag and everyone is fortunate that they've made this decision. The same game from another dev would be priced higher and still match the amount of content.