Hollow Knight: Silksong finally getting released has definitely had a major impact on the gaming market this month, with the release causing several smaller titles to slip under the radar. Hell Is Us developer Jonathan Jacques-Belletête went so far as to call Team Cherry’s decision to essentially shadow drop the highly-anticipated metroidvania as being “a little callous”.
In an episode of the Friends Per Second podcast, Jacques-Belletête spoke about how the release impacted several other games in the same time frame, calling Hollow Knight: Silksong as the Grand Theft Auto 6 of indie games.
“When you know you’re that big, I think a shadow drop is a bit like… wow,” said Jacques-Belletête.
“As the ‘GTA 6 of indie’… to shadow drop something like this is a little callous,” he continued. Despite this, however, he also noted that there were “emails and texts and messages back and forth between a lot of people, between us and our publisher — it was a real thing — we decided to keep the date, and I’m happy that we did.”
Rogue Factor’s decision to stick to its release date for Hell Is Us came down to the studio being bigger than the typical indie developer, and having the support of a publisher like Nacon. This, according to Jacques-Belletête, gave the studio the confidence that it would be able to weather the storm of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release.
“We’re still much bigger than some of the smaller ones who would have gotten a lot more affected and who decided to change their dates — changing the date of Hell Is Us would have been a pretty big endeavour,” he explained.
“The real pain in the ass is that you have to refund your pre-orders when you do that, right? That’s the real, ‘How you gonna do this?’ — now you need to rebuild them. We didn’t say, ‘Oh my god, we have to do it, but we can’t because of that.’ We were like, ‘No, I think we can get through the storm’.”
Jacques-Belletête doesn’t quite put all the blame on Hollow Knight: Silksong, since September onwards tends to be a pretty busy time of the year for video game releases. He also noted that Bloober Team’s Cronos: The New Dawn also came out at around the same time.
“Honestly, it’s not just Silksong, there was Cronos, it was a busy time,” he admitted. “That’s the thing nowadays, honestly — getting a window where you’re pretty much alone is almost impossible. 15 years ago, the mid-end of the summer was always a dead period. But there’s no such thing anymore. It’s just constant madness.”
Hell Is Us, Cronos: The New Dawn, and Hollow Knight: Silksong all came out at around the same time. Hell Is Us and Cronos: The New Dawn are both available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Hollow Knight: Silksong, on the other hand, is available on a wider assortment of platforms – PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and the Switch 2. All three titles have also been critically-acclaimed.
