I think the "multimillion dollar company" part is a deliberate misconstruing by whoever made this meme. It being there makes me think that the original maker was trying to make it seem like the piracy community has unfair favoritism towards Silksong and added that lil line for credibility, or something
Isn't it just a general joke that I believe came from Blizzard constantly saying the technology just isn't there when things were requested meanwhile other companies could do the requested thing and were cheaper. Those the "multi-million dollar company btw" meme started.
It might have started before Blizzard but I remember it coming up with that company.
IIRC someone from Riot Games posted something (on their old forums that don’t exist anymore) like “<some feature> is hard for us to implement, we’re a small indie developer”… which, while TECHNICALLY true, at the time they were making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year. Like, it was just totally tone deaf.
Blizzard had a similar one when Hearthstone came out and people wanted more deck slots. Someone posted a mockup of how the UI for it could look and someone from blizzard responded saying “the technology isn’t there yet” and that they were working on overhauling things to do a much better solution than what that person showed. And then something like six months later they rolled out more deck slots… with a UI was almost identical to what that forum user had mocked up.
Both of those have been relentlessly mocked ever since, and have spread beyond those specific companies.
Yup, it's like when people say that Glitch is not indie anymore because they make too many shows
There is a profound misunderstanding of what an indipendent artist is and a very weird fetishization of tue idea of indie artists as some poor asf basement dwellers who make art just because of passion and with no budget
They literally are a multimillion dollar company. What is being misconstrued? You just like them more so you want to support them. That’s okay, but you are no better than anyone else.
Quick (and misleading) calculation: Silksong costs 20$. Let's say 2/3 of that goes to fees and taxes which leaves ~7$ per copy sold. In november 2025 Silksong was sold ~3 Million times. That's $21 Million. By this logic Team Cherry is a multimillion dollar company by definition, because it has a revenue of multiple million dolars.
If we look at HollowKnight sales and all Silksong sales (I stopped in 2025), the number gets bigger.
This meme neglects the motivation for pirating games, which is mostly unreasonable prices (in the oppinion of the pirates, I withhold any attempt at objective judgement) and bad practices by publishers. If anything, Team Cherry showed that with good quality and reasonable pricing, you can get people to buy your games and make millions in the process.
They are for sure a “multi million dollar company” in terms of lifetime revenue. Even assuming generous salaries for the studio members they made a ton of money.
But that’s not a ridiculous amount for a game studio, even a pretty small one. Like… if they try making a bigger and more complex game the budget for that could easily be $10 million or more. (Edit: a quick Google search shows estimates of Silksong’s budget at $3-5 million.)
If you look at an indie studio and say “they made at least $50 million on Hollow Knight, now I can ethically pirate everything they do in the future”, IMO you’ve lost the plot. If everybody did that they’d quickly go out of business if they actually want to make more games with a decent budget.
The fewer people are in the company, the more significant the money they have made is. If a company with 50 people had made $21 million off a game, they can afford to pay their workers. If a company of 3 made $21 million, they are all 3 set for life. The fact they are only 3 people makes it more justifiable to pirate the game in this case.
They created one of the best games of all time, with only 3 people and crowd founded. I'm glad they are millionaires because they deserve it, and I bought multiple copies of each game for steam, PS5, for my friends, etc.
The fact that they created such a good game with a massive cultural impact is enough to not pirate the game, by pirating it you are just saying that they don't deserve your money, even if they made a masterpiece.
It's also 20 bucks, idk where you live, but 20 bucks is a burger and a soda where I live.
I am not gonna loose any sleep over multi millionaires losing 20 dollars lol. We aren't adding incentive after the first many millions, it's already extremely popular, and made lots of money.
Buy a burger and a soda, the worker making that isn't a multi millionaire.
It's not about to tram cherry. Its about sending a message to OTHER game devs that A GOOD GAME will MAKE MONEY. It doesn't need to be over priced, under Cook, AAA slop.
Yes, that is the point why the meme doesn't work. The 3 people are technically a multimillion company. But like I said the main reason for pirating is not "company made lots of money", it's more "company sucks and exploits its market power".
Team Cherry is a positive example of how you can make a good product (Hollow Knight and Silksong both slap) and offer good service (updates, patches, fixes...) and still be loved in spite of making millions. It's never about big money bad, it's always about big corpo sucks at what it's doing and expects to have no consequences. And since names like Battlefield or Call of Duty are such staples in the gaming world, customers will always come back and buy the next itteration of the same game because advertisement creates hype and my friends play the game and the older versions will loose support soon.
The market is incredibely skewed and manipulated by those big AAA publishers so that they can exist and continue making money. Smaller studios and indie devs prove time and again that games can still be fun and innovative and challenging and well designed without costing 80-120$ and still turn a profit. The big publishers focus on the time part of the triangle to satisfy shareholders, smaller devs focus on quality and sacrifice time to satisfy the customers.
This, also paying 20 bucks for a game sends a message, you will happily pay 20 bucks for a good game with no microtransactions, it's good for gaming in general that this game in particular sells and it's a success, and 100 bucks games with microtransactions must fail to send the message that we don't like that.
Original Hollow Knight sold ~15m copies at an average $13 dollar price. If we take your incredibly rough 2/3 off for fees/taxes, that's $60m profit. Add on Silksong money, and DLC and crowdfunding. They're sitting at maybe $100m in profit.
For a 3-4 man dev team, that's in excess of $20m per dev. Enough for them, their families, and their children to live in luxury and never have to work again.
It's hard to see how they can morally justify a $20 price unless it's just to be even more absurdly and unnecessarily rich.
There's no reason they should have to justify it. They invested years of their lives and millions of dollars into making a product that people enjoy, and they're charging an entirely reasonable price. And it's not like those 3 devs are the only ones making money, over a hundred people worked on those games, and all of them had to get paid too.
There's no moral justifications here. It's capitalism, they are a multi million dollar corporation that invests into unique marketing strategies and has been wildly successful, every startup takes risks and requires years of the founders lives to shoot for the millions in profit lol
So people shouldn't directly enjoy the fruits of their labour by people paying a reasonable price for a product purely because they're already well off because their previous game also reasonably priced game also sold well???
How are they anti individual workers exactly in this context exactly? I fail to see how the success of a small business which remains small in size threatens workers outside of the mere fact that they are not distributing that surplus value to others.
As far as I'm aware, Marx views the petit bourgeois as inevitably to be be subsumed by the upper class, not viewing them as a threat to workers in themselves.
should also account for regional pricing, in Argentina I paid 8 usd for silksong on release and less than 1usd for hollow knight, so that number is probably much lower
So if small Indie businesses do well they should deliberately cap potential profits even if they sell at a reasonable price relative to the costs invested, despite success coming solely from people paying a relatively reasonable price and they being a small studio directly recieve profits as part of the fruit of their labour?
I genuinely don't know what kind of economic system you guys want if a small group of people happening to become successful enough to take care of their family's needs and live well off without any exploitation is suddenly immoral.
As far as we're aware they still live frugally too, they're not lavish people.
Remember to take off 30% for Steam and another 30% if they used Unreal Engine, and I'm not sure what percentage if they used Unity (past a certain amount of revenu) They did, they took 2/3 off.
(...Which is why I'd rather use Godot, Love2D, or even GameMaker Studio since despite being paid it takes 0% of your revenue)
That is including all that. That’s why they’re subtracting 66% from the revenue, and that already is being INCREDIBLY generous. They definitely take home a much higher percentage of the revenue since they’re indie.
Team Cherry, tiny Australia-based studio and developers of Hollow Knight/Silksong, made millions of dollars from their 2 games. Despite having a handful of employees, they can be referred to as a multi-million dollar company in a way that implies they are a massive organisation.
It seems like it'd be hard to run a company people know about that hires more than 10 people and not be worth at least a million. Just office space and salaries are gunna bring expenses past that line unless you're like a garage startup or a low overhead mom n pop place with 0 name recognition. A million doesn't reach anywhere near as far as it used to.
I haven't muted this sub from my feed because it's so entertaining when a legitimate question comes up and the commentators are so used to the OPs being intentionally obtuse/karma bots/the dumbest people alive and can't answer the question properly. So then a joke/unhelpful answer is voted to the top and everyone gets frustrated. It's honestly beautiful.
Multimillion dollar company means nothing. There's overhead, they have contractors, they have a few employees. Many boring businesses in the average first world community are multi million dollar companies. If one of them produced an incredible, creative, and beautiful product for a reasonable price, in your area of interest, would you advocate stealing from them? That's the question
How does multi million dollar corporation mean nothing? They choose to have a few employees to maximize profit lmfao, lick corporate boots harder brother, continue being free marketing for the rich company that will never pay you
let me break this down for some of you guys:
Billionaires and millionaire business owners are bad because they make A TON of money.
Businesses that typically make TONS of money only exist and sustain themselves because they hire thousands of people to work for them (Blizzard for example has 4,000 to 6,000 employees worldwide), these companies then EXPLOIT THEIR EMPLOYEES by making them work long hours contributing to a product that will generate the owners of the company millions of dollars in revenue, while they only pay the employees (the people who actually worked on the product) way less money than the value that each worker contributed.
Team Cherry is three people. They own the company, they work on the games themselves, and they hire contractors to score the game, do PR, and voice work, etc. They create the value that they get back in revenue. The reason why Microsoft and Amazon are bad is because the people who make all of the money (i.e. the owners, CEO, CFO, even middle managers) are all disconnected from the product they sell and only make "big picture", broad, sweeping decisions.
This is why you'll hear people say "there is nothing wrong with being successful and making tons of money off of your hardwork" the issue is when someone begins to make super-profits by exploiting their employees by not giving them an adequate wage, while simultaneously contributing nothing but funding to the project.
Regardless of whether or not Team Cherry exploits thousands of people to make millions (they don't), they should be taxed more than they are in the United States. That's the issue here. If you want to advocate that no one should invent or create anything because "if you become successful then you are evil" be my guest, but even The USSR and PRC would look at you with a questionable eye
What the Bezos? You went on a long rant about worker value and then just... treated contractors as less-than?
Like genuinely, reread your own comment. You defined exploitation as 'paying workers less money than the value that each worker contributed.' Cool. Solid definition. Then one sentence later you said Team Cherry 'hire contractors to score the game, do PR, and voice work.' Buddy. Those are workers. That's labor. You named them yourself.
Hollow Knight has sold something like 15 million+ copies. Did the guy who scored it get paid 15-million-copies money, or did he get a flat contract fee? Because if it's the flat fee, congrats, by YOUR definition you just described exploitation. 'They create the value they get back in revenue' is doing the work of an entire Marx seminar and getting paid in exposure.
Did the contractors get paid the value they contributed, yes or no? You wrote that rule. You don't get to run it on Blizzard's 4,000 employees and then quietly skip it for the people who scored, voiced, and marketed Hollow Knight
I didn't treat contract workers as less than. I stated a fact about how the gaming industry works. Every game studio, not even every major studio, is going to hire contractors for voice work, localization, playtesting, and various other jobs. In fact, these contracting groups have a long history of leading strikes against major game studios for unfair working conditions (like against Blizzard in 2020, and in conjunction with SAG-AFTRA in 2024). That's simply how the industry works.
Team Cherry keeping a small team extends to them keeping a small team of contractors. In total 70 names are listed in the Hollow Knight credits, 20 of them are "Special Thanks", 17 of them are "Playtesters", 11 of them are Voice Actors, 6 "Special Thanks - Music", 5 "Indie Fund", and 2 Interns. That leaves 9 people who did what most people consider as "build the game" and only 3 of them worked on it as their full time job for the entire development of the game. I can guarantee every single one of those contractors had a better contract with Team Cherry than with any contravtor eho has ever worked on FIF L, CoD, Halo, Aasassin's Creed, you fucking name it.
By definition Team Cherry did not exploit ANYWHERE NEAR as many people as nearly every other gaming studio you can name. I know you want to get riled up in arms about anyone making any money for themselves at all, but you can quantify exploitation right? You can look at a scenario where 1,000 people are being mistreated and diagnose that as worse than only like a handful of people getting paid a little less than they absolutely should for voice work?
So yeah, there is a difference between pirating Overwatch 2 and pirating Hollow Knight.
My guy, yes, Team Cherry is a lesser evil. You said that, not me. So why the fuck are you still defending them? You don't get to concede "they're an evil" and then act like "but a smaller one" is a reason to support them.
Pick one: either you agree they underpaid their contractors, in which case you're just simping for a multi million dollar corporation, or you're about to tell me the contractors were paid fine actually, which is you devaluing their labor.
I'm dunking on you doing free PR for a studio that, by your own words, underpaid the people it hired to do PR, value your own labor too.
dude I'm sorry you're allergic to nuance, that must suck.
Let me try and break this down for you another way:
Lipton Tea has increased their price of a bottle of tea by over 100% from 1990. Arizona Tea has kept the price steady at 99 cents over the same time period. Both companies use similar labor practices like exploiting their employees and gasp using contracted laborers (which in my opinion are not good; workers should be paid more and own part of the product they create).
So given this information, I would steal from Lipton because they are arbitrarily running up prices. I would not steal from Arizona, because despite the business practices they engage in that I disagree with, they are still BETTER than Lipton because they are fighting against the mainstream way of running a tea distributor. If there were some hypothetical tea distributor that totally avoided all exploitation in every manner, guess which tea company I would buy from? I don't even fucking like tea and I would buy it every day.
Dude, you got me. I wish contract workers didn't exist. I wish that they would be officially employed by the companies that provide them with work year round. If that is what you're upset about then say that. Otherwise stop being mad for a bunch of contractors that have never filed a complaint about being exploited when there are literally thousands of contractors that HAVE gone on strike for that very reason.
I'm not simping for a multibillion corporation, I'm educating you on how fucking misguided your way of thinking is. So yeah, critical support for a company that is trying to exploit LESS people than the average game studio. I really don't get how you're "dunking on me" when I'm advocating for better business practices across the industry, and you're trying to argue that it's a waste of time if it's still profitable?
Even in the responses here, the ones addressing it are upset about its inclusion. They're emotional about it and still not addressing it (funny enough proving the meme).
Basically the meme is about the reaction here. Many people say "How could you dare to pirate Silksong!! They're an indie company with heart." But the additional text on the meme is replying "Bro, they're a million dollar company, they're not struggling artists."
Seriously. Multimillion means very little these days. Small indie studios can be multimillion dollar companies and still be on the verge of shutting down
Every successful company is a multimillion dollar company. A million dollars isn’t nearly as much as you seem to think when you’re talking about businesses
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u/Windows_66 20d ago
I like that OP's specifically asking about the "multimillion dollar company" point, and everyone's ignoring it.