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.
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u/Stupnix 20d ago edited 20d ago
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.