It's just three blokes and a bunch of contractors. According to Wikipedia Hollow Knight sold more than 15 million copies, at $15 that's $225M. Of course you have store fees, and discounts, and taxes, and whatnot, but all of that accounted for they still made at least dozens of millions – if not more.
It's unclear if they would make more money if it was much more expensive. I picked it up for €19.50 today; not sure I would have paid €80.
It’s a curious situation, the reason why it’s not pulling record sales in the first hours, is because nobody can buy it since everybody is trying to buy it at the same time.
Steam store checkout is off for 2h already!
A few years ago, I was feeling dispirited about being middle-aged and had come around to the conclusion that, at least when playing games, my general dissatisfaction and "meh" response to the games I was playing was probably a function of my age rather than anything about the games themselves. I was enjoying some games to an extent, but I wasn't being really grabbed by anything, and I was having a hard time sticking with much that I was playing. It seemed like a reasonable just-so story, and a particular exhausting one if you make games and theoretically are supposed to like them.
And then I picked up Hollow Knight, was utterly sucked into it in a deep way, couldn't put it down, and came out the other side doing the Principle Skinner meme - "Am I so out of touch? No, it's all those other games that have been wrong..."
So thank you Team Cherry, for helping remind me that 1) I really can love games deeply, even in my tired middle-aged-ness, and 2) sometimes the problem isn't that a person is being too judgmental, the problem is that the the lofty potential of their ideals really is, perhaps, justified, and other creative people (for a variety of understandable reasons, really - making games is a hard and costly business) mostly aren't even really aiming for such things.
When I was young there were two types of games I tended to enjoy: single-player games (e.g. Nethack, Half-life, Starcraft, & others with a good story and gameplay, or just deep gameplay) and LAN party games (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Total Annihilation, Quake II, and similar). LAN party games were more fun at LAN parties than online, and not just because server browsers all kind of sucked. Playing along with other people you can see in the same room is a very different experience from playing along with other people you've never met, can't see, and will never encounter again.
These days my friends are scattered across the country, with jobs & families, and so LAN parties are basically dead. And many new games don't even support LAN play, instead they tend to be optimized for online play with some sort of ranking system.
That leaves single-player games. And really good single-player games are rare, just like really good anything is rare. I find a lot of story-driven singleplayer games have good stories, but crap gameplay, so it's frustrating to try to complete the story. If the story is good enough & the gameplay bad enough I'll just cheat & treat the whole thing more like a book or movie instead of a game, but for a lot of games I just don't bother even with that.
But occasionally a game grabs me. The story is great, and the gameplay is at least good enough, or it's just really good gameplay that stays engaging for a long time (e.g. Slay the Spire). These are few & far between, because making really good games is very difficult.
As I age my tolerance for mediocrity decreases, partly because I already own a whole bunch of still-engaging games I can always play. So I agree with your points. The really great games are rare, far rarer than best-selling games.
FWIW there is a new-ish kind of intermediate genre between classic LAN/ranked multiplayer and single player, which is the whole “survival” genre. Generally speaking, they can be played as single player games, but also allow for small-scale co-op, synchronously or asynchronously. So even if you and a buddy have different schedules, you can make progress separately but still occasionally play together.
Valheim, Grounded, Ark, Satisfactory are a few among many others.
I do most of my gaming in the single-player indie space these days. It's really where the fun is. You have a deep time-tested catalog of beautiful and complete experiences that don't try to nickel-and-dime you with drip-fed content or recurring microtransactions. They're games first and foremost, not extraction machines. It's the opposite of the BS you see in big-budget titles.
Absolutely. I've been playing a lot of Stationeers (which, wildly, requires writing assembly on the in-game chips) and Satisfactory lately. Both are clearly labors of love by their small dev houses.
Same here. Hollow Knight and Elden Ring are the only two games in the last decade that I've put more than a few hours into. E.g I used to love Civilization, but none of them since 4 have done it for me. Same with Simcity2000. I'll play Madden or Fortnite with my kids, but I'm done mentally after 20 minutes.
The last game I liked like these was Morrowind back in 2004 or so. One of the great things about being a parent is sharing these kinds of things with your kids. I've already got Silksong downloaded on our Switch and XBox to play together when they get home from school in ~1 hr.
I believe there is a function of age to some degree, I 100% Assassins creed 2 at 14 and now I have a decade and a half of watching studios remake that goddamn game. They're all trying to make the best practice, safest game they can to reach the widest audience and end up bland with nothing new to offer those of us that have been playing a longer time.
Almost all my favourite titles of the last decade have been smaller titles, even the ones I bounce off I can appreciate them for trying something and missing the mark, there are genuine amazing works of art out there that a large studio simply can't produce.
I don't think the AAA games are 'wrong', to my bewilderment assassins creed sells like crazy each year despite near everyone in my friendship circle tapping out after the pirate one a decade ago, it's just if you play more than a couple things a year you outgrow the 'mainstream' titles.
The thing that stuck with me after learning about it is that AAA games aren't called AAA because they are supposed to be the best of the best or the most advanced.
AAA games are named after AAA investment ratings. A AAA game is supposed to be the most profitable investment for the publisher paying the upfront investment. And the market has gotten saturated with enough customers that doing new things to get more customers is more risky than doing the same thing to keep your existing customers.
I typically tend toward indie/small games as well, but there arw definitely some masterpieces put out by large studios. Have you played Red Dead Redemption or Cyberpunk? The amount of fidelity and content and refinement are just unmatched. I can't recommend them enough.
Also, if you like first-person puzzlers I recently picked up Supraworld and instantly fell in love, it's a gamer's game for sure and is one of the best platformers I've played in quite a while.
I've been keeping reviews in the last few years. Just privately, for myself. I started doing this because I couldn't remember what I did and didn't play, and had a "wait, I think I tried this before and didn't like it" deja-vu a few times.
Right now the rankings are: bad (388), meh (191), okay (71), good (63), superb (12). Turns out I dislike a lot of games. This is also why I started to just pirate things first and then buy if I like it; I have 558 games in my GOG library and I barely played (or like) >80% of it.
I can recommend keeping reviews by the way; I've since started doing this for tons of stuff, from games to films to TV episodes to wine to coffee, and writing things down really helps narrow down what you like or dislike about things. By keeping it private you can write whatever you like and don't need to do a "full" review. For example my entire review for Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound (rated "meh") is "Too fast-paced for my liking. Also don't really like the controls." And for me, that's enough.
I can write a long essay on why I like or dislike games, but to be honest I'd rather be playing Silksong.
have you played ori and the blind forest? that's another nice single player platformer, though it eventually proved too hard for me (can't really do the pixel-and-timing-perfect moves and don't much enjoy trying)
Perhaps allowing preorders for a day or two might have helped spread the load? Or at least moved it earlier so that the checkout load didn't overlap with the load from users downloading.
I was thinking about this for the recent GMTK game jam, which crashed itch.io.
Is it really such a bad thing for your launch/event to crash a platform? Nobody is going to decide not to buy Silksong after all because it's so wildly popular it brought down Steam. It generates a great deal of positive headlines. To me it seems like a good problem to have.
1. That's Valve's prerogative, not the developer's. If they're not partnered with Valve they may not have had the option to enact pre-purchases. [1]
2. The game has no DRM and Steam preorders (in my experience) download the game files so people can play instantly on launch day. (They call it 'preloading'). For a game as highly anticipated as this, it'd likely just be cracked, leaked and pirated the moment preorders came live.
You get all these photo-realistic graphics games, and people comparing making games to making movies in terms of size of team and cost, and then something like a platform game with 2D graphics based on doodles crashes download servers.
I'm probably being naive, but I feel surprised that in 2025, a platform like Steam (which has existed for well over 2 decades and has around 70M DAU) is having this type of issues. I don't want to downplay the complex engineering behind scale and massive surges of demand, but it's not like it's their first rodeo. What seems to be blocking users from getting the game is accepting payments, nothing computationally complex per se IMO
Huge spikes over a short period of time are hard to deal with for anyone, and payment processors have their own infra whose scalability Steam can't necessarily control.
Payment systems turn out to be particularly thorny because they hit an intersection of technical issues with conflicting goals:
* You want them to be as fast as possible (ideally: instantaneous)
* You want them to be validated (long-poll to a third party validation service)
* You need them to be sequentially auditable (this is a "... or you could go to jail" requirement)
* If a failure occurs, you don't want to be out your own money
While these are solvable, it's the reason that so many cloud services suddenly hit scaling issues at the payments layer: things are going great and then that layer gets involved and "oops, hold on, we're waiting on Visa's servers. Still waiting. Stillllll waiiiiiting..........." Or the team was certain they'd simultaneously solved speed and sequential auditability this time but, oops, there's yet another sequencing point that's actually a bottleneck.
Credit card based payment systems really shouldn't suffer these kinds of problems: The entire reason why credit cards exist in the first place (compared to debit cards) is to enable distributed, asynchronous, eventually-consistent payments. It should be perfectly normal for a business like steam to simply store the details necessary to process payment and then eventually reconcile with them, at a pace that the processors can handle. Instead we've built a world that operates under physics-violating assumptions. Gah.
The fact that every platform, even the biggest, richest, and most "has their shit together" you can name, has had this problem at some point, points to it not actually being as solvable as you would expect.
Also considering how Steam gets hammered every big sale launch. Well I am not even sure that hurts their sales that much. So as long as your site continues to somewhat work and you recover in hours it is not in the end big deal.
I think pay to view events might have hardest time as then there is actual need to be available at that exact time.
Is something wrong in payment and/or entertainment spaces? Not just that there is ongoing censorship problem, but there's also sudden increase of PC port of mobile games, and now this. Feels like there could be common root cause of a profitability problem.
It's not like this kind of thing happens everyday. If Valve spent the money and effort to prevent itself from something like this, it could, but would it be worth it?
No system is completely redundant proof. It's just a matter of money and infrastructure. They didn't have any preorder system in place even so everyone had to search, buy and download all at the same time. It's probably close if not more than a million people waiting for a countdown to buy it.
Bad planning, maybe but definitely not a conspiracy against the game.
In this specific instance, I am mildly surprised preorders weren't offered. That would have taken some load off their servers and granted them money sooner; win-win for them.
What I don't understand is why Steam and others don't use a torrent-like protocol on their back-end to reduce their bandwidth requirements large numbers of customers downloading the game at the same time. Back in the day WOW used used it for distributing large patches it seems to be a solved problem.
Downloading the game wasn't a problem for anyone, as far as I know the CDN held up fine. The problem was the steam storefront, i.e. actually buying the game.
This makes sense because there are several live service games on steam that have hundreds of thousands of active players - any update will put a large instantaneous load on the CDN as all the clients are forced to update at the same time, and this happens extremely frequently so they've had to get good at handling it.
What doesn't happen very frequently is hundreds of thousands of people trying to buy a game at exactly the same time, because most games have pre-orders.
In an interview, Gabe commented on his very question. Answer was that this involves a bunch of technical complexity vs just spending money on the problem. Steam also has such an enormous library now vs a single game company that you are still going to be mostly dependent on a few huge seeders.
For any P2P protocols to work, including BitTorrent, you need to be able to access the other nodes. In today's world, that's becoming harder because everyone and their granny are gradually being hidden behind a strict CGNAT.
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No wonder Silksong is only $20. I saw the memes about the devs asking for $20 and assumed it was $20 more like $60=>$80 or something like that.
It's unclear if they would make more money if it was much more expensive. I picked it up for €19.50 today; not sure I would have paid €80.
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And then I picked up Hollow Knight, was utterly sucked into it in a deep way, couldn't put it down, and came out the other side doing the Principle Skinner meme - "Am I so out of touch? No, it's all those other games that have been wrong..."
So thank you Team Cherry, for helping remind me that 1) I really can love games deeply, even in my tired middle-aged-ness, and 2) sometimes the problem isn't that a person is being too judgmental, the problem is that the the lofty potential of their ideals really is, perhaps, justified, and other creative people (for a variety of understandable reasons, really - making games is a hard and costly business) mostly aren't even really aiming for such things.
These days my friends are scattered across the country, with jobs & families, and so LAN parties are basically dead. And many new games don't even support LAN play, instead they tend to be optimized for online play with some sort of ranking system.
That leaves single-player games. And really good single-player games are rare, just like really good anything is rare. I find a lot of story-driven singleplayer games have good stories, but crap gameplay, so it's frustrating to try to complete the story. If the story is good enough & the gameplay bad enough I'll just cheat & treat the whole thing more like a book or movie instead of a game, but for a lot of games I just don't bother even with that.
But occasionally a game grabs me. The story is great, and the gameplay is at least good enough, or it's just really good gameplay that stays engaging for a long time (e.g. Slay the Spire). These are few & far between, because making really good games is very difficult.
As I age my tolerance for mediocrity decreases, partly because I already own a whole bunch of still-engaging games I can always play. So I agree with your points. The really great games are rare, far rarer than best-selling games.
Valheim, Grounded, Ark, Satisfactory are a few among many others.
Most AAA games are over pretty quickly, so they are quite suitable for that role.
The last game I liked like these was Morrowind back in 2004 or so. One of the great things about being a parent is sharing these kinds of things with your kids. I've already got Silksong downloaded on our Switch and XBox to play together when they get home from school in ~1 hr.
Almost all my favourite titles of the last decade have been smaller titles, even the ones I bounce off I can appreciate them for trying something and missing the mark, there are genuine amazing works of art out there that a large studio simply can't produce.
I don't think the AAA games are 'wrong', to my bewilderment assassins creed sells like crazy each year despite near everyone in my friendship circle tapping out after the pirate one a decade ago, it's just if you play more than a couple things a year you outgrow the 'mainstream' titles.
AAA games are named after AAA investment ratings. A AAA game is supposed to be the most profitable investment for the publisher paying the upfront investment. And the market has gotten saturated with enough customers that doing new things to get more customers is more risky than doing the same thing to keep your existing customers.
Also, if you like first-person puzzlers I recently picked up Supraworld and instantly fell in love, it's a gamer's game for sure and is one of the best platformers I've played in quite a while.
Right now the rankings are: bad (388), meh (191), okay (71), good (63), superb (12). Turns out I dislike a lot of games. This is also why I started to just pirate things first and then buy if I like it; I have 558 games in my GOG library and I barely played (or like) >80% of it.
I can recommend keeping reviews by the way; I've since started doing this for tons of stuff, from games to films to TV episodes to wine to coffee, and writing things down really helps narrow down what you like or dislike about things. By keeping it private you can write whatever you like and don't need to do a "full" review. For example my entire review for Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound (rated "meh") is "Too fast-paced for my liking. Also don't really like the controls." And for me, that's enough.
I can write a long essay on why I like or dislike games, but to be honest I'd rather be playing Silksong.
Is it really such a bad thing for your launch/event to crash a platform? Nobody is going to decide not to buy Silksong after all because it's so wildly popular it brought down Steam. It generates a great deal of positive headlines. To me it seems like a good problem to have.
2. The game has no DRM and Steam preorders (in my experience) download the game files so people can play instantly on launch day. (They call it 'preloading'). For a game as highly anticipated as this, it'd likely just be cracked, leaked and pirated the moment preorders came live.
[1]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/prepurchase
Aside, your second point is incorrect. The SteamDB folks have a public write up on analysis of the preload system: https://steamdb.info/blog/steam-download-system/
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It's success is well-deserved.
I have a similar list of _art_ instead of most _entertainment_, and Hollow Kight there together with Disco Elysium
Dead Comment
* You want them to be as fast as possible (ideally: instantaneous)
* You want them to be validated (long-poll to a third party validation service)
* You need them to be sequentially auditable (this is a "... or you could go to jail" requirement)
* If a failure occurs, you don't want to be out your own money
While these are solvable, it's the reason that so many cloud services suddenly hit scaling issues at the payments layer: things are going great and then that layer gets involved and "oops, hold on, we're waiting on Visa's servers. Still waiting. Stillllll waiiiiiting..........." Or the team was certain they'd simultaneously solved speed and sequential auditability this time but, oops, there's yet another sequencing point that's actually a bottleneck.
I think pay to view events might have hardest time as then there is actual need to be available at that exact time.
Bad planning, maybe but definitely not a conspiracy against the game.
This makes sense because there are several live service games on steam that have hundreds of thousands of active players - any update will put a large instantaneous load on the CDN as all the clients are forced to update at the same time, and this happens extremely frequently so they've had to get good at handling it.
What doesn't happen very frequently is hundreds of thousands of people trying to buy a game at exactly the same time, because most games have pre-orders.