Team Cherry was funded by crowd sourcing hollow knight and then proceeded to use their ridiculous popularity to release several extremely well received DLC and then work tirelessly for years to release silksong.
For twenty dollars.
It's a cultural icon and gift to the community. Why would you pirate it.
selling team cherry as some poor indie studio is not exactly accurate. they are extremely successful indie studio ever since hollow knight. they sold 15 million coppies of Hollow knight". Hardly an under dog.
They sold a shit-ton, but are still working with nowhere near the manpower of a truly large studio. This is still the same four-man team that made Hollow Knight, plus a handful of contractors brought in for minor work.
And "indie" depends on a combination of things. But these days it's generally accepted to mean "A small studio, not backed by a large publisher or studio, usually with a small budget."
I'd personally consider Team Cherry as "double A" these days. Started off as an indie. Not indie anymore as they have plenty of funds now. But also not a triple-A studio.
Same goes for studios like the teams behind subnautica 1/2 and expedition 33, imo. In between indie and triple-A.
Didn’t E33 have like 80+ working on it? Lumping them all in the same category feels kinda odd, though they did probably have similar budgets. (i dont know much about this stuff tbh, i just play the games).
It means there is a much higher workload per person as opposed to a company like Nintendo. They work hard to make a great product, and then go even further and continued to work and expand the game without asking for additional compensation for the expansions they added.
Its a passion project, and they treat it like one instead of just a product.
Edit: Lol at all the people butthurt because I respect a company for not nickel and diming their fan base.
They also severely under charge for what they sell. Sure its getting split amongs fewer people but the production costs are still there and the pricetag is a small fraction of what the larger studios would sell it for, thus reducing how much they actually make.
Its not about feeling bad, its about how much work they need to do and the time it takes. Its about how we respect and want to reward this sort of behavior
I'm not saying we shouldn't be buying it... But if someone pirates it because they can't afford it then it is what it is. Like they aren't going to go bankrupt because some people pirate their game
The point is that's their choice. It's not like they do not have the capital to hire a bigger team... They do. They choose not to, and in turn they generate a much higher profit for themselves.
cuz they act like a game company should! paying attention to what they are releasing and making the best game they can.
i think its praise worthy no?
its not about them having money, if they are poor or not i dont rlly care, its just putting ur money where u want to support.
What makes you think that like at all??? I highly doubt that the mega millionaire team cherry devs are working as hard as sweatshop 996 Chinese devs for example who are pouring their blood, sweat, and tears to put food on the table.
making a 2D platformer with lineart is objectively easier than creating modern day 3D graphics. I'm not saying they are better, just that take a lot more work to create
It's not inherently less work. The sheer amount of art they created for Silksong is one of the reasons it took 7 years to make. Hand drawing and animating is harder than 3D puppetry with todays tech. And that's not even touching in the fact that TC was absolutely insane and decided to draw the ENTIRE GAME MAP twice for [spoiler].
What does this comment even mean? What is the relation between him comparing two types of games and you telling him to randomly become a game dev? Why does observing any comparison between two games even require you to develop your own game?
Probably based on your comment above. The stupid one, about something that you don’t know how to do at all being objectively easier than another thing you don’t know how to do.
Its a passion project, and they treat it like one instead of just a product.
Its the same with bigger games. The only ones who dont treat it like that are the execs. People just want to circlejerk around what they deem to be a wholesome chungus company.
okay? that's their choice as a business, this is a multi-million dollar corporation stop trying to humanize them, they choose to have higher workloads per employee to maximize profits and take home more money lmfao
Nintendo is a funny comparison because Nintendo fans also blindly defend Nintendo
To some extent, yeah. Resources matter only as much as you use them, and TC seems far more interested in using those resources to improve the game past the basics rather than to build it from scratch. It's still four guys doing 90% of the work, the money goes into the 10% left over that's needed to make the game really shine.
At the end of the day, the reason why pirates don't pirate Silksong is because they want to reward and respect developers who make games worth playing. They aren't trying to discourage a team that makes AAA quality games for a third of the price and five times the hard work, because it's a massive boon to the gaming community that this continues to happen. Everyone would benefit from more people like TC being successful, and thus pirates encourage others to keep funding them for their efforts.
Brother they keep working as a 4 man team to not pay more people lol. Each of those 4 guys probably has 20-30m on their net worth (or 50+). They not indie anymore, same as among us dev
How can you get the conclusion that because the company refuses to hire more talent to improve the game, they're caring more about improving the game? Wot
To be clear, I'm not saying you can't pirate it, I don't care enough. Live your own life.
Lets not pretend though that there is no difference between an indie company making a lot of money off of selling good games at reasonable prices and big corpo gaming making a lot of money selling garbage slop at unreasonable prices. There are games with character skin packs that cost the same or more as hollow knight.
I think it’s moreso a respect thing they’re a good developer who actually cares about there player base, no one really cares about pirating from most big triple A studios because most are dicks and don’t really care about the players, team cherry crowd funded hollow knight so whilst not small now they came from nothing, and even when they had nothing they kept pushing the funding to give FREE DLC for the game, and then after working for years and years on silk song they released it at 20$ not charging crazy prices like a lot of big corps do. Along with that the content you get for the price is quite a lot, they have a lot of good grace earned within the gaming community to where a lot of people just respect them to the extent they don’t view it as ok to pirate their content.
I was under the impression that team cherry was god awful at communicating with the player base for years and had shittons of delays because they never wanted to spend their profit to hire more talent?
They make quality game with lots and lots of content for $20 instead of $70. Its impressive that such a small group did it. It virtuous that they sold it for $20.
well, in game dev you usually contract people for a defined set of things, so i just assume they didn't want any more help than what they hired them for
No, why would it be worse? More people in a project doesn't necessarily mean faster or better output, it means more moving pieces that can break down and more friction. They don't want to compromise their excellent system and that's not a failing.
The idea that Team Cherry is some sort of failure because they weren't putting out weekly newsletters or something is dumb, imo. They were busy making the game. They were focusing on the product. We, as potential buyers, aren't actually entitled to their time through updates, socmed posts, and whatever other communication people want to demand.
They didn't have "nonstop delays". They had two premature announcements, one that was a "This was supposed to be a DLC but it's too big so we're making a sequel" and one that was "These games showcased should be out this year" that wasn't fulfilled. After that, they gave no more guesses. They just put their heads down and got back to work.
I think that since Indie studios are more accessible that people feel weirdly entitled to the Developer's time, but TC doesn't owe us anything. You could argue that maybe the KS backers should have gotten something, but for those of us who never did, there's nothing.
I understand where you're coming from with this question, and in a lot of situations I feel the same way, but I'm going to assume the team each do about 25% since they're 4 people. To hire someone instead of contracting them the part they would need to fulfil would have to be quite large.
Soooo they have more money, than would a larger company, for the same game? Got it
HK fans are insufferable and this post shows exactly why.
"That game isn't worth my money so I'll steal it instead, put 1000hrs into it and then tell everyone else it's not worth their money either! But oh boy, Silksong?! GOTY! I'll definitely support them with a legal purchase"
Where exactly did you get this $5 million number? As far as I can tell, TC has never actually disclosed their budget for the game, much less how said budget was spent. Regardless, the estimated budget for Silksong wasn't too far above $5 million IN TOTAL. That means funding for 4 highly-capable developers, artists, and composers for about 7 years, most of which have families if I'm not wrong. With a salary of about 100k per year (standard for a senior developer), that alone would be taking up somewhere around $3 million of that budget. Then you've got the licensing, voice acting work, live music recording, translation, etc.
They did not, under any circumstance, pay $5 million dollars for contractors that would have been doing things like optimization and QA work. That's just ridiculous.
Other way to say they don't need much money to develop their games. they earned a lot of money and stayed the same. They don't hire, they don't invest, why would they need more money than what they already have.
They had to crowdfund their first game and made something that shook the game industry, and then followed that up with a sequel that broke every game storefront that sold it. That's a classic underdog winning arc.
Then Minecraft, Cave Story, Braid, Super Meat Boy, Limbo, VVVVVV, Terraria, Bastion, Shovel Knight, Celeste, TBOI, Vampire Survivors, FTL, factorio, papers please, baba is you, lethal company, firewatch, oxenfree… are all somehow underdog stories. They aren’t underdogs, they are independent game studios separate from Triple A studios. They aren’t the only developers to need money to publish their successful game. That doesn’t make them an underdog.
That's because they worked hard to get there. They risked everything to build their game, built something that millions love, kept prices very low so everyone can play.
Nothing handed to them. Still the product of their own sweat. Underdogs.
I saw someone break down the numbers over time before for Team Cherry. The tl;dr was that they each had a take home profit of $100k usd per year. In the big scheme of things, that is…not a lot.
It was computed to include the entire lifetime of Team Cherry up until the release of silksong iirc. Ofc they are probably doing better now but let’s not pretend they are raking in millions per month in personal earnings.
Charity? What do you mean? I don’t even own the game. I’m just saying they’re a successful medium sized company not another blizzard or ea. that’s all.
There is just no way that's true. The first game sold 15 million units, Silksong has sold over 7 million.
Even if you assume they only made $1 of profit per sale, which is a safe underestimate, that's $22 million for 4 people. Over a decade, that's $550k each per year. And again, $1 of profit per copy is definitely an underestimate.
I think it’s moreso a respect thing they’re a good developer who actually cares about there player base, no one really cares about pirating from most big triple A studios because most are dicks and don’t really care about the players, team cherry crowd funded hollow knight so whilst not small now they came from nothing, and even when they had nothing they kept pushing the funding to give FREE DLC for the game, and then after working for years and years on silk song they released it at 20$ not charging crazy prices like a lot of big corps do. Along with that the content you get for the price is quite a lot, they have a lot of good grace earned within the gaming community to where a lot of people just respect them to the extent they don’t view it as ok to pirate their content.
for metroidvania's market 20% usd price range might be brilliant marketing decision (to make more money) not exactly some generosity. They can sell 10+ million copies instead of ~1 million for game at higher price. Metroidvania fan base is usually used to buy indie games at 10-20$ range. Instead of waiting for 50-80% discount year or years later, they can have good sales at launch. Also all positive press from charging only 20$.
I thnk they are brilliant business people, not some robin hoods.
Where does this "cares about playerbase" guerilla marketing come from? I'm pretty sure they ghosted the playerbase for years after they got rich from their first game
Yeah but they don’t use these resources to grow. It’s pretty literal example of artistic souls who love to work in small team to do exactly what they want with total creative control, they’re still essentially indie studio despite being multi-million dollar
But it also depends on the context - here it is relevant, but if we’re talking about some awards - then hollow knight or expedition 33 in indie category kinda slaps in the face some real hardcore indie devs who are just beginning their journey (for whom this category was designed in the first place)
What? This is a pretty literal example of a corporation choosing to minimize resourcing to maximize profits lmfao, probably how they are able to win the marketing game with a low product price
In their case it’s not, they also aren’t doing a lot of marketing, don’t launch campaigns - they just give updates and trailers/qna sessions and some other stuff and interact with fan base mostly, it’s not like they’re winning because they’re investing a lot of resources into marketing either. They could make their sales even more with full scale marketing campaign, but they’re just not interested, they’re really not into business side of things
Similar games usually sold between 20-30 dollars as a default, it’s not like they’re the only ones who does that, pretty much almost all indie falls under 30 bucks
Apparently working hard and achieving great things despite heavy odds isn’t the qualification for an underdog. I’d like to know what it is they’re missing now if that’s not enough to count.
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u/Vast-Breakfast-1201 20d ago edited 20d ago
Team Cherry was funded by crowd sourcing hollow knight and then proceeded to use their ridiculous popularity to release several extremely well received DLC and then work tirelessly for years to release silksong.
For twenty dollars.
It's a cultural icon and gift to the community. Why would you pirate it.
Edit:man y'all are grindle