Team Cherry, developer of Hollow Knight and Hollow Knight Silksong, the latter of which we finally have a release date for, is already working on DLC for Silksong, the team confirmed in an interview that went live alongside Silksong's launch date news. The report also delved into why Team Cherry took as long as they did to make Silksong, with the answer more or less being that they were having too much fun working on the game.
In an interview with Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, the studio's co-founders, Ari Gibson and William Pellen admitted that "We’ve been having fun. This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things," said Pellen.
Gibson added that the team never hit a wall with development. Silksong's long journey to release wasn't a result of a complicated development process that involved them overhauling the game and having to re-do major parts of it, like what BioShock 4 is currently going through. Instead, it came down to the fact that they just kept adding more to the game, and the more they added, the more work was involved in ensuring it was at a level of polish on par with their standards and everything else in the game.
Also, Team Cherry never expanded to a massive team, and keeping things small also played a key part in how long everything took.
"Even at that point we were recognizing that it was going to become another giant thing to rival the scale of Hollow Knight or probably exceed it," said Gibson. "And then because of how we work, obviously the world ended up being just as big or bigger. And the quest system existed. And the multiple towns existed. Suddenly you end up six, seven years later."
Another key part of why Silksong took as long as it did is that Team Cherry had all the runway it needed for six, seven, or even 15 years, with Hollow Knight confirmed to have sold over 15 million copies since its launch in 2017. That kind of indie success can keep a small team working and fed for a long time, with Gibson and Pellen even admitting that they're only finally launching the game "for the sake of just completing the game."
"I remember at some point I just had to stop sketching," Gibson continued. "Because I went, ‘Everything I’m drawing here has to end up in the game. That’s a cool idea, that’s in. That’s a cool idea, that’s in.’ You realize, ‘If I don’t stop drawing, this is going to take 15 years to finish.’"
And if you're remembering the times where we were sure that Silksong was ready, only for it to be delayed, Gibson and Pellen say that at the time, they truly believed it would have been out, if not for the fact that, as previously mentioned, their small team and amount of content required they take their time to ensure everything was at their standards. In fact, the last two years of the game's development have been spent just on polishing and bug squashing, pun intended.
All together, Bloomberg's report is the exact kind of story you'd want to hear about an indie studio like Team Cherry. Instead of being burnt out, they're just as excited as they were six years ago to keep working on the game. That's why they already have DLC in development. They've only been so quiet about the game because they didn't want to "sour" any excitement around it, since any update we could've gotten was that they were still working on it.
Also, if after all this time and all this excitement, you still feel cautious about Silksong and wanted to wait for reviews on it, know that you'll be waiting well after release, since Team Cherry thought it would be "unfair" to those who backed the game on Kickstarter years ago if critics got the chance to play it ahead of everyone else, and won't be sending out pre-release codes for reviews.
Hollow Knight Silksong will be out on PC, current and last-gen consoles in just two weeks, on September 4, 2025.
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