In retrospect, it was probably a good idea for some developers to delay their games as far away from Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release date as possible. Steam fell apart the moment it came out, preventing people from buying it for the first few hours. And even if you survived the initial blast, you’d be lucky to pull people away from what ended up being a game that was worth the wait.
The list of games that scrambled when Team Cherry surprise-dropped a date was impressively long. A total of eight games, including Demonschool and Baby Steps, had their schedules pushed forward in response.
“To some extent that probably is unfortunate,” Team Cherry co-founder Ari Gibson told Bloomberg when asked about the flurry of Silksong-induced delays earlier this year. He says it all happened so fast that the date was a surprise to the team working on it, too.
“Even we felt like we didn’t have a lot of control over our own date because we basically were rushing, rushing, rushing toward the end, working right up until the last point,” he says. “And then the minute we thought this was ready to release, suddenly we’re releasing it.”
Gibson says the release date wasn’t finalized until “basically a week or two before we put out the trailer.”
As we know from previous interviews, Team Cherry’s approach to game development seems to be mostly vibes-based where it just keeps adding stuff until it feels like it could be considered done. That’s how you end up working on a single game for seven years, and how you make a game that people are still picking apart months after release. So, the idea that it had no idea it was going to come out until the very last minute tracks.
Whether or not the release date would’ve really made a huge impact on other games coming out around the same time is debatable. Silksong is unique enough that I think some of those other games would’ve been fine, but I suspect it provided a good enough excuse for some of them to spend a little more time polishing things up—time they may have been quietly happy to have.
Silksong is big, but it’s not Grand Theft Auto big. Soon we’ll get to experience this all over again as every game tries to escape GTA 6 in November.
