Hollow Knight: Silksong Just Got Pushed Back And Fans Are Bummed
Hollow Knight: Silksong was delayed without a determined release date slated.
Hollow Knight: Silksong, the long-awaited sequel to the beloved 2017 original, was supposed to drop in the first half of 2023, but the release was delayed further. This delay isn’t all that surprising considering the ongoing trends in the gaming industry, with giants canceling a ton of games, games being more expensive, and console makers raising the prices of their hardware. The volatile market that now favors blockbusters and nothing else is really susceptible to delays, and it would seem that indie developers aren’t immune to delays either.
According to Kotaku, the developer of Hollow Knight: Silksong, Team Cherry, made the announcement via Twitter, stating that the game won’t make it in the first half of 2023, but the development continues, and the title is shaping up. The reasons for the delay are typical—the developers need more time to make the game as good as it can be. The gaming community is advised to sit tight and expect more details about the game as we draw closer to its release, which wasn’t specified by the developer.
Admittedly, all the other games that were, at one point, associated with Hollow Knight: Silksong were either delayed or have proven to be a massive failure, such as Starfield and Redfall, respectively. The game was officially announced on Microsoft’s 2022 showcase, which was supposed to showcase only those releases that are due out in the following 12 months. That obviously didn’t happen for a whole slew of gaming titles. Starfield suffered a crushing delay, and Redfall proved to be a massive disappointment.
This also means that Hollow Knight: Silksong won’t appear in the upcoming Xbox showcase and Summer Game Fest showcase, which are supposed to fill the hole left by E3 just being canceled, as a result of nearly all major manufacturers canceling their attendance. Additionally, the development team’s refusal to commit to a release date for the game is probably just a sensible precaution. However, the careful wording of the tweet might also suggest that the game might slip into a 2024 release window.
Hollow Knight: Silksong was first announced in 2019, but the development team’s subsequent silence about the game’s development, with the exception of a trailer that dropped in 2022, has made the fans of the original game desperate. The upcoming title was conceptualized as the expansion of the original game, but, just like the upcoming Tears of the Kingdom, it has grown into a full-fledged sequel and quite an ambitious sequel that has, according to the developers, grown quite a bit—thus requiring more time to polish up.
As things currently are, Hollow Knight: Silksong has no release date, but it’s scheduled to release on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S—where it should drop on Game Pass from day one—and Nintendo Switch. In other Nintendo Switch-related news, Nintendo stated that the company wouldn’t release a Switch successor or a revision of the current hardware this year and that the sales are slowing down. This means that we’re likely to see another price drop for one of the best-selling consoles in the world.
