Team Cherry has announced a release date for its long anticipated Hollow Knight: Silksong, which will launch on September 4, 2025.
Speaking to Bloomberg, the Australian indie developer also revealed that Hollow Knight has sold 15 million copies since its release in 2017.
When asked why it’s taken seven years to develop Silksong, co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen explained that the team were “having fun” and that as a small team, “games take a lot of time” to make.
“The whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity,” said Gibson. “It was never stuck or anything. It was always progressing. It’s just the case that we’re a small team, and games take a lot of time. There wasn’t any big controversial moment behind it.”
Silksong was initially designed to be an expansion pack for Hollow Knight, but it grew too big so Team Cherry decided to change it into a full sequel.
“Even at that point we were recognizing that it was going to become another giant thing to rival the scale of Hollow Knight or probably exceed it,” Gibson explained.
“And then because of how we work, obviously the world ended up just as big or bigger. And the quest system existed. And the multiple towns existed. Suddenly you end up six, seven years later.”
Pellen added: “You’re always working on a new idea, new area, new boss. That stuff’s so nice. It’s for the sake of just completing the game that we’re stopping. We could’ve kept going.”
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As for why Team Cherry didn’t post frequent updates on the game’s development, Gibson said they thought “updates were going to sour people on the whole thing” as all they could say was “we’re still working on it”.
They also wanted to avoid spoiling the game.
“Instead of popping up and bugging people for the sake of it, it felt like our actual responsibility was to just work on the game,” said Pellen.
“Probably at the time we thought we’d go quiet for a year or two, then the game would come out.”
Gibson added: “I think we’re always underestimating the amount of time and effort it’ll take us to achieve things. It’s also that problem where, because we’re having fun doing it, it’s not like, ‘It’s taking longer, this is awful, we really need to get past this phase.’
“It’s, ‘This is a very enjoyable space to be in. Let’s perpetuate this with some new ideas’.”