The Buzziest Video Game of the Year Is Here. Its Success Proves Something.
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calc(100vw - 30px)" width="1560">Sometimes, in our modern world where every Goliath wants to be seen as a David, where the middle class is evaporating and the working class is crushed and the wealthy play victim, the little guy still manages to win. Sometimes the little guy even wins big. And then sometimes the little guy wins again , in a manner that destabilizes a faltering industry, upends media coverage, and incites multiple minor culture wars.
That's how it went for Ari Gibson and William Pellen, a pair of Australian game developers known collectively as Team Cherry, who last week released the only video game that every gamer is talking about right now: Hollow Knight: Silksong . A sequel to the 2017 game Hollow Knight , Silksong arrived on Sept. 4—with a Taylor Swiftian surprise announcement a mere two weeks prior —and immediately sent a tidal wave throughout the gaming industry. Its shock arrival (and the knowledge, upon the announcement of its impending release, that it would be a surefire hit) caused other game studios to delay their own offerings to avoid any overlap—the kind of thing you only really see for gaming's long-lived king of the hill, Grand Theft Auto . The deposit was warranted: With no advance copies given to press or influencers, and with no presale program, online storefronts everywhere immediately crashed at 10 am Eastern , when the game went live. It was a smash hit, just like its predecessor had been.
Given its humble beginnings, few could have predicted the wild success of the Hollow Knight series. The first installment was funded via Kickstarter, with Gibson and Pellen raising 57,000 Australian dollars off a 35,000 goal for the proposed game Hollow Knight . With that funding, the pair were able to scale up their already-in-progress game, add talent like composer Christopher Larkin and programmer Jack Vine, and release Hollow Knight in 2017. The game was unassuming yet enthralling, a demanding work charming enough to encourage those not inclined to take on dexterous challenges to give this particular one a shot. The critical reception was stellar , and sales were terrific —half a million copies in its first year , the equivalent of hitting the lottery for an indie game made by a handful of people. But then the game kept selling. And selling. To the tune of 15 million copies sold, as of August 2025 .
Part of what elevated Hollow Knight from cult hit to bona fide phenomenon was buried in that original Kickstarter: a stretch goal for a “second playable character” to arrive sometime after the game's launch. As Team Cherry's fortunes rose with Hollow Knight 's success, the duo's implementation of that second character grew more elaborate. A fun bonus became a planned additional chapter extending the story. In early 2019, the addition became a full-on announced sequel , Hollow Knight: Silksong . Then, at the end of that year, Team Cherry went dark, promising to say more when the game was ready.
If there is one unassailable truth about gamers as a demographic, it's that the only thing they like more than a very good video game is a game that hasn't come out yet. Part of Hollow Knight ’s appeal was that it felt like a secret you were getting in on, a new classic minted right in front of your eyes, made by a handful of Australian guys working outside the system with a surreal yet cute sensitivity. As Hollow Knight ’s reputation grew, so did the hype for its sequel. For much of the past five years, waiting for Silksong became a popular meme , which fed back into interest in Hollow Knight , a perfect ouroboros of promotion that most games with many times the budget and personnel would run through a Saw contraption for.
Silksong ’s domination for the past week stands out amid the current bleakness of the video game space. Team Cherry has done something incredible, a genuine grassroots event of a video game in an industry that is no longer built for that sort of thing, that likely wouldn't have allowed the pair to have they not decided to crowdfund and self-publish. Games are in the same position a lot of mainstream entertainment is, which is to say that expense, corporate interference, and a relentless thirst for wider profit margins have led to massive retrenchment in familiar brands. Games, however, are not as nimble as other industries. Video games take much longer to create, which makes money people even more nervous and provides a powerful incentive for homogenized output that's more product than art, built to be as agreeable as possible to as many as possible.
Against all odds, however, lightning struck twice for Team Cherry. And so, in an industry and culture in crisis, it becomes natural to seek life rafts, to read solutions or problems in whatever captures our fractured and frightening attention. Games media—another field facing multiple crises of its own —is currently in a race to attach meaning to the moment, while everything is still new and consensus has not yet formed. Was Silksong emblematic of the problems facing games criticism ? Or not really ? Is the game too difficult ? Is that a problem ? Is it fair ? What does Team Cherry owe its peers in the video game business?
A lot of these questions are, frankly, kind of silly, and one might wonder why a single game has to bear an entire industry's insecurity. That precarity, however—both within the games industry and in the media that reports and comments on it—is the unspoken rationale behind every cultural skirmish happening around the game. When it is nigh impossible to get anyone's attention over anything, a single blockbuster release can become a referendum on any number of topics, some of them worthwhile, others merely hitting a ride. The attention economy can turn anything into a circus.
The rarity of a game like Silksong breaking through is partially what makes it ripe for this sort of scene-specific culture warring. It’s driven, more or less, by the same root questions that follow a surprise hit in any field: What is there to read into Silksong ’s success? And if so, the million-dollar question: Can it be reproduced?
The most honest answer is also the least satisfying: kind of. It is no secret how much troubles the gaming business is in, even as it rakes in tremendous profits, due largely to the aforementioned aversion to risk and single-minded investment in established intellectual property. Independently produced games are no substitute for a robust industry with multiple paths toward producing games at various budgets—the duo behind Team Cherry were able to make Hollow Knight because they lived lean for years, according to a Bloomberg interview with Pellen and Gibson . Its wildfire success allowed them to make Silksong at a pace that was downright leisurely, to let the team stay manageably small and keep the games' personal touch that millions of fans had responded to the first time around.
A lottery ticket is not a business strategy, and no amount of bootstraps inspo posting will make it so. But an array of publishers willing to regularly bankroll small and midbudget games that do not seek to be all things to all people can increase the odds of striking gold. Balatro , last year's indie games success story , was a solo developer's side project that turned into a minor phenomenon. People want to make smaller, idiosyncratic games (thousands are released every year), and people want to play them. The story isn't all that different from every other creative field: Whether we're talking video games, midbudget movies , or broadcast-style medical dramas , there is a hunger for entertainment that isn't so high stakes or so tied to a brand. The entertainment business used to be structured this way, with a wide array of projects casting a wide net, and breakout hits—your Seinfeld s, your Titanic s—subsidizing the rest of the slate. Post–Marvel Cinematic Universe, though? It's franchises all the way down.
Yet, after nearly two decades of cinematic universes and IP empires, people are rediscovering the pleasures of life outside unending franchises. In cinemas, 2025's steady string of original smash hits, be it Sinners or KPop Demon Hunters or Weapons , is more or less shouting this from the rooftops. Games do not have a similar internal push right now beyond the independent scene, which is vibrant and experimental in a way that dazzles daily but is starved for funding and support.
Silksong is, of course, a sequel, so it isn't the best rallying point for original art. It is, however, true to the vision of a handful of talented game developers with an affinity for the adorably macabre and old-school grueling challenges in an industry that rarely lets any studio last long enough to forge a distinct identity. If the video game industry wants to survive where other fields are faltering, it needs to orient itself around finding and supporting not the next Hollow Knight but the next Team Cherry.
