Why Silksong is a Problem for Nintendo and Sony.
Hello you wonderfully wonderful Patreon people!
I hope that all of you are doing fabulous, that all your little health aches magically disappear and that your most anticipated game will get a surprise release date within the next couple of weeks.
Speaking of Silksong.
We finally got a Silksong release date!
In less than a week we all will finally be squashed by bugs over and over again.
Something I very much look forward to!
And something I actually want to waffle about today.
Because Silksong is not only a very anticipated game, it is also a game with drastic ramifications for the industry.
But one thing after the other.
I assume most of you are probably familiar with Hollow Knight and Silksong at this point, but just to be sure let’s quickly recap the plot so far.
So Silksong is famously the sequel to Hollow Knight.
Hollow Knight is an indie game developed in roughly three years by a core team of only three Australians.
An indie game that ended up becoming a smashing success.
The game sold over 15 million copies - making it the most successful single-player-only-indie game ever made.
Hollow Knight is one of the most successful new IP’s in gaming this past decade, providing a wonderful experience for well over 40 hours of playtime that wowed players and critics alike.
Silksong is its sequel that has now been in development for seven years.
A game so anticipated that it actually ended up becoming the most wishlisted game on steam as of right now.
To round it all up Hollow Knight launched at a price point of 15$, often going on sales even below that and Silksong will release for roughly 20$, despite the game being expected to exceed Hollow Knight in scale.
Hooray.
So why do I bring all of this up one might ask?
Well, because there is actually a lot to unpack here.
Like a lot.
The mere existence of games like Hollow Knight or Silksong are a declaration of bankruptcy for huge parts of the industry.
Just think about it for a moment!
Three unknown developers in Australia, managed to make a game that sold over 15 million copies.
To put things into perspective.
Hollow Knight sold more copies than the Wii U version of Mario Kart 8, the original Super Mario Maker or the Wind Waker remake did.
Combined.
But not only did they manage to produce a game that easily outsold The Last of Us 2, they also created one of the most beloved franchises in all of gaming and did it on a budget of less than a million.
To put things into perspective once again.
Ghost of Tsushima was praised when it was released for being a triple A game that was developed on an unusual low budget.
And yet this game cost 60 million to produce while only selling a bit over 9 million copies.
And Ghost of Tsushima was successful enough to get a sequel - which should give you a good idea on how absurdly profitable Hollow Knight has been.
And this is kind of the point that I want to make.
You see, development costs for gaming have been going up for decades.
Back in the N64 era big games were often developed by a core team of two dozen people over two to three years.
Nowadays it’s over 200 people and often takes over half a decade to develop a game.
Developing games has been becoming more and more expensive, yet gaming prices have actually gone down if we adjust them for inflation. (Games were actually the most expensive during the SNES era and have been slowly dropping in price till the PS4 era. Since then they have been roughly stable.)
So how did companies manage to develop ever more expensive games while at the same time charging less for games in real money?
Well, via several things.
First, the entire gaming market has been growing which tremendously helped.
Second, they moved on from cartridges.
First they distributed games on discs and then they switched to distributing games mainly digitally which brought costs down a lot.
Third, they found new and clever ways to monetize games - like pre order bonuses, DLC’s and microtransactions.
But this development has stalled.
Most games are nowadays distributed digitally, micro-transactions have long turned into macro-transactions and the video gaming market isn’t growing as fast anymore.
And yet development costs still keep rising.
Which means big publishers only really have one choice - don’t they?
They have to raise the prices to offset the ever raising development costs.
But.
Here comes Silksong.
A game that is expected to feature well over 40 hours of polished content.
A game expected to sell millions within days after launch.
A game that is actually the most wishlisted game on steam.
A game selling for 20$.
Silksong is just as anticipated as the biggest triple A games are.
Games like Hollow Knight or Claire Obscure are just as beloved as the most expensive games are.
But for us as consumers it doesn’t matter if a game was made by 3 people or by 300.
All that matters is if the game is any good.
And over and over again we have seen that small indie teams are as capable of delivering great experiences as gigantic studios are.
At this point about half my gaming time is spent playing indie games - a number that is still increasing.
Games like Silksong are a gigantic problem for the biggest players in the industry, because they undermine their entire strategy.
If companies develop games with ever increasing amounts of people and ever increasing budgets then the only way for them to stay profitable is by ever increasing the prices of their games.
And here comes Silksong and launches for 20$.
That’s the huge problem that indie games cause the big publishers.
Triple A games have to compete with the indie market yet most indie games are highly profitable at much lower prices.
The next 2D Metroid game that Nintendo releases is just in direct competition with games like Silksong.
But if Silksong costs 20$ then it is very hard for Nintendo to justify a price of say 80$ for a 2D Metroid, isn’t it?
Neither is it very attractive for Square to release the next Final Fantasy for 90$ if Claire Obscure costs half that price.
Here’s the thing that makes all of this so absurd.
Indie games are actually incredibly profitable to develop.
The most insane example to prove this is Stardew Valley, a game that sold over 20 million copies and was developed by a single person.
Things don’t get much more profitable than that.
Small teams will always be able to compete with large releases in terms of price, simply because a successful game developed by a small team is insanely profitable even at a 20$ cost point.
But the fact that incredible games permanently get released at price points of only a fraction of what the big publishers charge, prevents them from drastically raising the prices.
The indie market is acting as a brake, stopping big publishers from really escalating their prices.
Something that is very healthy for the industry as a whole.
At least in my humble onion.
Anyway - what’s next for us?
Well first there are two more Bananza videos that I have planned.
The first one will be a pretty small and quick one about glitches in the game.
That one is honestly just meant to buy me some time because I have to learn a ton of glitches anyway for the other Bananza video I have planned.
What is the other video?
Well, the dumbest thing I’ve ever done of course!
We are going to route Bananza without touching gold.
Or touching very little gold.
Or at least not touching much.
Hopefully.
What coined possibly go wrong …
Expect the next Patreon update after the challenge run!
Finally, as always a huge and gigantic thank you to all of you for your generous support.
You wonderful people are really making a difference here and I can’t thank you enough.
Comments (15)
I agree for the most part but "Triple A games have to compete with the indie market yet most indie games are highly profitable at much lower prices." is absolutely not true imo. A huge amount of indie devs pour years into a passion project 3 people will play on Steam. It's much harder to get a million people to play your indie metroidvania than your 3d action adventure open-world, even when it's 1/4 of the price.
Yeah you are right - I worded that a bit unfortunate! Getting noticed and reaching an audience is incredibly difficult for indie devs! The big problem for the big publishers is how profitable the few indie games are that actually manage to reach the mainstream.
Hey Ceave, thanks for the post, great insights, like always. Do you have any thoughts on Silksong so far? Looking forward to the Donkey Kong videos!
I’m really loving the game so far. There are only a couple of small quarrels that I have but they are probably going to patch those anyway. It will be a while until I do a big critique of the game, but I might write down my thoughts in a patreon update in a couple of weeks!
First of all, thank you for wishing our health aches would disappear, because the time this was posted matches pretty exactly the time I really started healing well from my cold. Second, I am so excited for the bananza run dodging all shiny yet deadly gold. From what I know of the game it might be impossible, but if anyone can pull it off, it's probably you. Thirdly, I wish you a happy skonging! Lastly, I wish mobile patreon let me add newlines because this is gonna be hard to read (sorry).
I really feel like Nintendo's losing the next generation of players. There are currently enough diehard Nintendo fans to let Nintendo continue to be profitable for a while without trying to stay competitive. Adults will buy the $80 games. Adults will bring their kids to Nintendo movies and theme parks and buy their kids Nintendo merchandise. But I don't know to what extent they'll buy their kids $80 games and an expensive family subscription. It's only worth that kind of money if said adult knows they'll be enjoying it themselves in addition to the kids playing it. And they certainly won't be buying their kids their own systems. It's a luxury item now, not a family toy. Ten years from now, there may be far fewer people interested in buying Nintendo games if Nintendo neglects their core audience like this. It's short-term greed at the expense of long-term strategy.
The fact that the economy is going to shit and most people can't even afford 60$ games without careful thought anymore doesn't help.
Following on from my comment about few indies being hits, and more in line with the point Ceave is making: What if a big company like Nintendo started (or continued) budgeting games like these indies? Nintendo has done this in the past - the 3DS era was full of little Nintendo games, such as the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series. But this has dried up in the Switch era. While most of those didn't hit it big like Hollow Knight did, neither do most indies. But with Nintendo's clout behind them, there's a much higher floor to what they can expect to bring in. So if they made enough of them (but not so many and so badly that their clout stops helping them), they increase their chance of one of them breaking through and making it big. Is it a good business strategy? I really don't have the insight to say. But I think it would be healthier than the current strategy of asking for more money for games that aren't improving enough to be worth it, while consumers are able to look at the indie scene and find ridiculously low-cost treasures like Hollow Knight or Balatro and get a similar great experience for a fraction of the cost.
For a while, Ubisoft had also done that with Rayman Origins/Legends and Child of Light. I saw this discussion in a recent Butterscotch podcast, where they suggested companies don't do it because they're not interested in the "small margins" of profit that smaller games provide. Leadership wants big games that big money. They see Fortnite and want to make the next Fortnite. Anything less than multi-hundred-million profits isn't worth consideration. And that makes sense. The profit margin of Hollow Knight is a pittance to multi-billion dollar companies. They'd need hundreds of "Hollow Knights" to make the profits they want, but you can't just assemble a hundred teams of 3 people and get a hundred Hollow Knights. Maybe you'd get one or two, which are now trying to recoup costs for the dozens of flops, and all these games are competing against each other... Yeah, that doesn't work.
It’s absolutely wild that Silksong is less than half the price of a game like Mario vs Donkey Kong, and yet SS will deliver over 5 times the amount of playtime. Probably even more!
Not much to add about the pricing of Silksong, which is lower than what I expected (i was betting on 25€, like hades iirc) but I'm inclined to think it won't change much within the industry. For several reasons: 1) indie hits are a VERY low percentage of all the indie released, success is not the norm 2) FOMO is a thing, and sadly I can see that alone fueling the AAA industry for many years to come 3) I have the feeling that many publishers are waiting for the release of GTA 6... if Take-Two raises the entry price many others could follow... I mean, they already clearly want to, but probably waiting for the right moment to charge +10€/$ on every purchase Also, considering how gaming slowly becoming a luxury, I can imagine people going back to consider the amount of hours each euro/dollars spent give them, making few very bloated AAA strive while many others fail miserably. I mean, Square learned nothing from the success of Nier Automata in 2017, I don't see Clair Obscure/Astrobot changing much either.
The point of the Sunshine video rings more true than ever, Nintendo has been cashing in their goodwill like crazy. Reminder that the Switch 2 tutorial costs half as much as Silksong...
So I wasn't the only one thinking back about that video. It seems Nintendo has finally done it; it's burning the trust to fuel the money.
I think one issue on the indie side is that yes, the successful games are very profitable, but the vast majority aren't successful. Much more so than in traditionally-published games, indie game sales are dominated by the small fraction that break through into the wider public consciousness. Published games have better marketing channels to get the word out, and so there's less risk of a game completely bombing.
That is true, and Hollow Knight is very much an anomaly. If you go back to pre-release comments (like a reddit thread about the trailer) many people assumed it wouldn't do well because "it's just another indie 2D platformer". The overwhelming majority of them don't do well. Hollow Knight thankfully gained steam and got the attention it deserved. So did Celeste. But for each of those there's probably hundreds, maybe thousands of indies that undersell relative to their actual quality because few people give them a passing thought. There's no buzz around them, the algorithms discourage making content about them, "it's just another indie 2D platformer". It breaks me that Levelhead didn't do well enough to justify continued development despite doing so many things no other UGC game does. For every passion project that succeeds, so many others flop, forcing the creators to chase more trendy genres or "get a normal job". I hate the "2D indie platformer" stigma. Fallen Leaf deserves better.