So big week this week as Hollow Knight: Silksong is releasing tomorrow and it is the #1 most wishlisted game on Steam.
Should we scream? Cry? Yell? What is an appropriate level of fear?
Here is a chart of the number of games with at least 400 followers released every week since January 1, 2025. (Week 44 is the week of October 20th.
Silksong is releasing on Week 36 (indicated in red). So far this week is the 3rd smallest launch week of the year.
- Week 1 is the lowest because of the holidays obviously.
- Week 27 is the week of Steam Summer Sale.
- Week 42 is the week of October Steam Next Fest. I imagine this number will increase as we get closer and more games lock in their official release date.
Only 29 games are brave enough to release against Silksong though.
Most interestingly is Adventure of Samsara which is also a metroidvania launching on the SAME DAY.
I asked the game’s creator and CEO of Ilex Games, Marcelo Rigon for their thoughts on the launch date
“Adventure of Samsara” is a game with a very long backstory dating back 2016 with the name of “Tower of Samsara”. After 9 years, we got a publisher, pre orders up, got builds certified on all platforms. Everything was moving according to the plan until Silksong announcement for release on the exact same day as our title – September 4th. We talked a lot among ourselves and with Atari and we decided to keep up with the promise we made to the people that already made their pre order. Two days to go, to see if we made a good or a bad move.
Marcelo Rigon – CEO of Ilex Games
I respect their bravery and don’t think it is that crazy of an idea.
** Note I set the limit at 400 followers because that usually correlates with a game that has enough wishlists to appear on Popular Upcoming.
Fight-or-flight response
Indies always complain that there are “TOO MANY GAMES ™” launching. Here is the 3rd lowest week of the year and they are changing their dates?
This is an interesting case study because Team Cherry announced the actual release date for Silksong rather late. That announcement caused a bunch of games that had locked in their date to reschedule at the last minute.
I snapped this shot of the upcoming release calendar the day Team Cherry announced their release date to see how many of these games would change:
Surprisingly, of that list, only 7 games decided to change their date to avoid the Silksong launch. Here they are:
| Game | Original launch date | New launch date | Number of days moved |
| Lord Ambermaze | 9/2/2025 | 9/17/2025 | 15 |
| Cloverpit | 9/3/2025 | 9/26/2025 | 23 |
| Demonschool | 9/3/2025 | 11/19/2025 | 77 |
| Relic Guardian – Tower Defense | 9/3/2025 | 10/22/2025 | 49 |
| Kejora | 9/4/2025 | 1/8/2026 | 126 |
| Daimon Blades | 9/4/2025 | 10/6/2025 | 32 |
| Baby Steps | 9/8/2025 | 9/23/2025 | 15 |
Ironically by delaying the game by 2-3 weeks those games landed themselves in a period that has 2x to 3x the number of releases. Let’s look at that chart again.
There are still 29 brave games with 400+ followers keeping their release date this week. Let’s salute them!
Was it smart to reschedule?
In the short term doing anything that uses the word Silksong gets you attention.
Thomas Reisenegger of the Publisher Future Friends Games posted that when they did a marketing beat around the Clover Pit reschedule they went semi viral.
They even got a free PCGamer article out of it.
In response to Silksong launch, Devolver and the developers behind Baby Steps created a whole new trailer that announces their rescheduled release date with a cheeky Silksong reference. That video got over 123,000 views (almost twice as much as their original date announce trailer)
Here is how Lord Ambermaze announced it. Not sure if I endorse this. A call to action would be nice. Seems a bit too low-effort and can come off as crass.
Even if you don’t change your launch date and put out a statement that mentions Silksong, you will get wishlists. The developer of Machick 2 said they got a spike of 400 wishlists by putting out this announcement confirming they weren’t going to change their release date.
So I guess the lesson here is, whatever you do, put out a press release that mentions Silksong. Maybe even if you are releasing a game in 2026 you should release a trailer or something confirming that you are sticking to your 2026 release despite the release date of Silksong.
Create a Reddit post saying what you are doing in regards to Silksong.
Post on all the other social media sites too.
Why the Silksong release probably doesn’t matter
People hate when I say that big game releases don’t really affect your game’s Steam release. The only time I got ratioed on twitter was when I said that the Nintendo Switch release of Tears of the Kingdom won’t affect your Steam indie game release. (I did the math, it didn’t. It turns out the Twitter masses aren’t always right).
I won’t tweet about it, but I still don’t think Silksong’s release will affect you either even if you are releasing on Steam.
Here is why.
Purchases are based on emotion, not whether they will play it
Most players don’t actually play games when they buy it. Shoppers buy games because they THINK they want to play the game. They are excited by the idea, enticed by the graphics. They will play it as soon as they finish their current game. They promise they will play it next. Seriously this time. I do think people will play Silksong right away, but if they also see a new metroidvania that is also on discount that also looks interesting they might pick it up because they will play it when they finish Silksong.
I found this comment in the discussion boards of Adventure of Samsara.
More players = more potential buyers
Hollow Knight is big and broad enough that it pulls in people who don’t normally check Steam every day or buy indie games. Imagine the Steam shopper who comes in to buy Silksong but also sees another Metroidvania recommended in the more like this widget. It might be better to have a game available so that with the influx of traffic to Steam more people are exposed to your game.
The actual share of players is small
Even though it seems like the whole gaming world is talking about it, in reality only a very slim portion of the extremely online, extremely news conscious gamer is thinking about Silksong. When Starfield launched in 2023 only 3.4% of Steam was playing it. I know it seems like everyone is talking about the hit new game, but in reality a tiny tiny fraction of people are.
“But what about content creators?!”
Yes there will probably be a lot of them playing Silksong, but usually the content creators that matter most for us are the ones that are variety streamers that play one game per stream. They most likely won’t spend their entire month playing through all of Silksong.
Similarly, I find that content creators drive wishlists which later convert to sales. Browse reddit long enough and you will read exasperated indies complaining that “Youtuber <xyz> played our game and we only sold $100 worth.” That’s actually quite common.
Content creators increase wishlists, which later lead to sales when you go on discount. This is why demos are so great. You get content creators to play your demo months and months before to bank wishlists and the wishlists convert on day 1. Your success is driven by the months leading up to launch, not the week of launch.
Steam drives most sales
Also the Steam algorithm drives most of your visibility and sales (that’s why you pay them 30%). Widgets like the Discovery Queue (DQ) and Popular upcoming and New & Trending will do most of the sales for you (not getting coverage by the press or content creators). Silksong may be big, but they still only take up one slot in the DQ and Popular Upcoming. There are still tons of games on the front page of Steam.
What I will be watching at launch
Note I said I don’t THINK the Silksong release will affect most other games. But I am not 100% sure.
So here is what I will be looking at during the week of the Silksong launch to see how it affects things
Total Steam CCU
Total Steam traffic is boringly rhythmic.
Thursdays typically range between 35M to 37M people online and 10M actually in a game. I don’t think Silksong is going to impact that but if I see the number jump up to 12 million in game, and there are 1 million CCUs on Silksong, maybe that is something.
Our Metroidvanias that are Canarries in the coal mine.
So as mentioned above, Adventure of Samsara has the same release date as Silksong. The game has a respectable 831 followers at launch.
I pulled a bunch of other 2D, Pixelart, Metroidvanias that have launched this year that had similar follower counts at launch.
| Game | Followers at launch | Max CCU | Follower to CCU ratio | Reviews at end of first week |
| Cosmobreeder Yiffai(April 25, 2025) | 206 | 114 | 1.8 | 60 |
| Adventure of Samsara(September 4, 2025) | 831 | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| Unbroken The Awakening | 1063 | 7 | 151 | 6 |
| Awita: The Journey of Hope (June 18th, 2025) | 1500 | 22 | 68 | 52 |
| Primal Planet (July 28, 2025) | 3906 | 189 | 20 | 139 |
| Inayah – Life after Gods (March 26, 2025) | 1706 | 63 | 27 | 90 |
As you can see from the chart, Metroidvania is a tough genre. There doesn’t seem to be much lift post launch no matter when they launch and no matter how many followers they have.
Based on other Metroidvanias, I expect the Max CCU for Adventure of Samsara to be about 30 and probably 30 reviews by the first week. If it is significantly lower that could be a sign Silksong had an effect.
So next week I will check in on Adventure of Samsara to see how it compared to the other Metroidvanias.
How many indie streamers actually play through Silksong
Will Wanderbots play through the whole thing across multiple videos? He has done it in the past.
Will Splattercat stop playing random indie game of the week to dedicate his channel to it? Eh. He has played a bunch of Metroidvanias but never actually Hollow Knight on his channel.
Iron Pineapple? Maybe? He has never played Hollow Knight on his channel either.
What about Real Civil Engineer? Will he put down crafty buildy games to play a linear story based adventure? I doubt it.
But we should pay attention.
How long New & Trending games stay on the list
Since every other indie developer chickened out, there aren’t many games launching for the next 2 weeks. That means New & Trending and Popular Upcoming are going to slow way down and these games are probably going to stay on the lists all week.
Here are the lists on (September 3rd) 1 day before Silksong launched.
I will be checking each day over the next week to see how the list changes. The New & Trending chart may be very very static which is good for the newly released games and why I think launching on the same day as a blockbuster is a smart move.
So what did we learn?
I see the Silksong launch as a trial run for the Grand Theft Auto 6 launch. If other games launching in the shadow of Silksong, I think it is a totally legitimate strategy to launch the same week as GTA6.
My big worry is that nobody knows exactly why they are avoiding these mega blockbuster launches. I think part of this scarcity mindset comes from the PR industry’s influence on games marketing. Movie PR is constantly shuffling releases around because in movies there are only 6-12 screens per theater. So many PR people come from that tradition and carry that mentality without ever questioning it.
Games are different. There are infinite numbers of screens unlike your local theater. Similarly when watching a new film release you don’t buy a ticket and not see the movie. Where as more than half of most games are never played. So we really should rethink traditional wisdom. Don’t just follow along because “that is how we have always done it.” At least look at the data.
Whatever the case you should definitely make a big press push saying whether or not you are launching next to a big game. It is free visibility.
Also repeat after me “it is not the size of the game launching, it is the number of them.” If you there are not that many other games launching, you could get a piece of the spotlight.