Neither Deltarune or Silksong could be preordered so everyone was zerg rushing the stores at the same time.
Note to clouders, they could spend on pre-warmed autoscaler pools, but a corporation that spends a single dollar of revenue more than necessary to make the sale is violating its duty to shareholders, and total gross launch revenue will be the same whether they do or not, so they won’t, even though they could.
Note to game developers, for this exact reason you should be demanding launch month bonus targets rather than day or week; any less and you’re being knowingly ripped off by business execs.
Sometimes, the idea hits so hard that you don't even need the time investment. Notch got Minecraft from version alpha to version 1 in 2 years. That one was lightning in a bottle; unlikely to be reproducible consistently.
Is it really such a bad thing for your launch/event to crash a platform? Nobody is going to decide not to buy Silksong after all because it's so wildly popular it brought down Steam. It generates a great deal of positive headlines. To me it seems like a good problem to have.
2. The game has no DRM and Steam preorders (in my experience) download the game files so people can play instantly on launch day. (They call it 'preloading'). For a game as highly anticipated as this, it'd likely just be cracked, leaked and pirated the moment preorders came live.
Aside, your second point is incorrect. The SteamDB folks have a public write up on analysis of the preload system: https://steamdb.info/blog/steam-download-system/
It's success is well-deserved.
I have a similar list of _art_ instead of most _entertainment_, and Hollow Kight there together with Disco Elysium
That is, unless you really want to feel like you're part of the conversation these first few weeks after Silksong comes out.
Yeah, HK is a huge game and Silksong is probably bigger; it'll take a while to play through both. But that's a good thing. Play these games for the experience of playing them, no need to rush through them just to check them off a list.
There's nothing wrong with using a guide if that's how you have the most fun. But I think most people would have more fun playing Hollow Knight without one, which is why I don't think "if you [play Hollow Knight], use a guide or something" is good advice as an unqualified statement. I enjoy the experience of playing a game far more than the accomplishment of having completed it, so I'd rather enjoy a game fully and leave it unfinished than halfheartedly rush through it with a guide.
So, yes, I probably should have qualified my statement.
I meant this more if my parent wanted to get through Hollow Knight quickly, as a gateway for Silksong.
I say this because just thinking about playing Silksong immediately after finishing HK made me feel exhausted.
I wouldn't recommend playing HK in this manner though; it's more fun to explore, and use a guide only if you really hit a wall.
So, yeah in hindsight probably bad advice even after qualification.
If you don't like the backtracking (I hated it), then the game is probably not for you.
If someone enjoys playing a game with a guide, what's the problem exactly ?
"beating the game as quickly as possible" is such an obviously flawed reason to use a guide that I won't even respond to it. If you don't have the time to play the game, don't.
That being said, from what I’ve played of Silksong so far, it doesn’t seem to be crafted such that you’ll get the most out of the gameplay only if you played HK. Full appreciation of the in-game lore you’ll discover in Silksong is probably another matter, but even then I think playing them in either order will be a good time. Enjoy!
No wonder Silksong is only $20. I saw the memes about the devs asking for $20 and assumed it was $20 more like $60=>$80 or something like that.
It's unclear if they would make more money if it was much more expensive. I picked it up for €19.50 today; not sure I would have paid €80.
And then I picked up Hollow Knight, was utterly sucked into it in a deep way, couldn't put it down, and came out the other side doing the Principle Skinner meme - "Am I so out of touch? No, it's all those other games that have been wrong..."
So thank you Team Cherry, for helping remind me that 1) I really can love games deeply, even in my tired middle-aged-ness, and 2) sometimes the problem isn't that a person is being too judgmental, the problem is that the the lofty potential of their ideals really is, perhaps, justified, and other creative people (for a variety of understandable reasons, really - making games is a hard and costly business) mostly aren't even really aiming for such things.
Most AAA games are over pretty quickly, so they are quite suitable for that role.
These days my friends are scattered across the country, with jobs & families, and so LAN parties are basically dead. And many new games don't even support LAN play, instead they tend to be optimized for online play with some sort of ranking system.
That leaves single-player games. And really good single-player games are rare, just like really good anything is rare. I find a lot of story-driven singleplayer games have good stories, but crap gameplay, so it's frustrating to try to complete the story. If the story is good enough & the gameplay bad enough I'll just cheat & treat the whole thing more like a book or movie instead of a game, but for a lot of games I just don't bother even with that.
But occasionally a game grabs me. The story is great, and the gameplay is at least good enough, or it's just really good gameplay that stays engaging for a long time (e.g. Slay the Spire). These are few & far between, because making really good games is very difficult.
As I age my tolerance for mediocrity decreases, partly because I already own a whole bunch of still-engaging games I can always play. So I agree with your points. The really great games are rare, far rarer than best-selling games.
Valheim, Grounded, Ark, Satisfactory are a few among many others.
The last game I liked like these was Morrowind back in 2004 or so. One of the great things about being a parent is sharing these kinds of things with your kids. I've already got Silksong downloaded on our Switch and XBox to play together when they get home from school in ~1 hr.
Right now the rankings are: bad (388), meh (191), okay (71), good (63), superb (12). Turns out I dislike a lot of games. This is also why I started to just pirate things first and then buy if I like it; I have 558 games in my GOG library and I barely played (or like) >80% of it.
I can recommend keeping reviews by the way; I've since started doing this for tons of stuff, from games to films to TV episodes to wine to coffee, and writing things down really helps narrow down what you like or dislike about things. By keeping it private you can write whatever you like and don't need to do a "full" review. For example my entire review for Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound (rated "meh") is "Too fast-paced for my liking. Also don't really like the controls." And for me, that's enough.
I can write a long essay on why I like or dislike games, but to be honest I'd rather be playing Silksong.
Going over things, the dividing line between "good" and "superb" is somewhat arbitrary, so I included both, because well, why not? I did it like that to mimic the commonly used "5 star" rating, but maybe it should just be three: "bad", "okay", "good". Dunno.
Also note that I haven't played many games. I'm just now getting around to The Witcher 3, which is over ten years old. So...
"-" starts a new entry, followed by one or more titles, followed by "tag: value", followed by whatever I wanted to write (if anything) as Markdown. It lists "superb" first, alphabetically, then "good".
Almost all my favourite titles of the last decade have been smaller titles, even the ones I bounce off I can appreciate them for trying something and missing the mark, there are genuine amazing works of art out there that a large studio simply can't produce.
I don't think the AAA games are 'wrong', to my bewilderment assassins creed sells like crazy each year despite near everyone in my friendship circle tapping out after the pirate one a decade ago, it's just if you play more than a couple things a year you outgrow the 'mainstream' titles.
Also, if you like first-person puzzlers I recently picked up Supraworld and instantly fell in love, it's a gamer's game for sure and is one of the best platformers I've played in quite a while.
AAA games are named after AAA investment ratings. A AAA game is supposed to be the most profitable investment for the publisher paying the upfront investment. And the market has gotten saturated with enough customers that doing new things to get more customers is more risky than doing the same thing to keep your existing customers.
I have a hard time getting into games anymore, but hollow knight was one that actually kept my attention enough to finish. Super great game!
I enjoyed both games but I found that with the exception of the last boss Nine Sols was a way easier game after you figure out how to parry effectively.
I also enjoyed the whimsical art style of HK a bit more than the (as said in a comment) "taopunk" style of NS, but that's purely subjective.
But if you enjoy metroidvanias both are great games that you should try.
For me it was the other way around. In Nine Sols I got immediately stuck in the boss (mini-boss?) fight against two enemies and the flying gal.
Hollow Knight was difficult at times (Coliseum of Fools, Radiance) but it never felt unfair. Some fights (Mantis Lords, Grimm) are among the best times I've had playing a game
People trust Team Cherry to deliver a commensurate experience to Hollow Knight, which stands as many peoples' favorite games of all time.
This kind of hype comes rarely, and it's very specific to this specific game.
Nintendo famously spends something like 6-8 years on its flagship titles (both Tears of the Kingdom and Mario Kart World are in that timeframe). Sometimes, depending on the team you're working with and the material you have, it turns out the secret to making a good game is... Time.
This is not something Nintendo is famous for. This is just the norm in modern day game development now. It took 3 years for Mario Galaxy to get a sequel back on the Wii.
There was a person /u/UrsaRyan on reddit.com/r/civ doing a Sid Meier's Civilization related meme for about two years on daily basis until next (seventh?) installment in the game was released. That one flopped though, so yea, not sure what my point is, guess something about hype for a game on reddit or something and in the end it not paying off.
Many games do well at a few aspects, but few hit it out of the park across the board.
Hollow Knight managed something pretty close to that. It's a creative feat that required not only excellence in storytelling, art, music, and interaction design, asking others, but also excellence in blending then together to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.
The studio that did that is releasing a new game in the same vein and people want more of that established track record of excellence.
First you're looking at it wrong: it doesn't really matter how busy the calendar is. I mean just because people say that it does matter how many games or creative products or whatever are released, and just because some of those people are experienced execs, doesn't mean that it's true.
People who buy games aren't thinking, man I don't have time for games. Okay? So you see how the first thing to understand is: this isn't for you. Someone who has to make choices about how to spend their time isn't buying many games at all.
Before Silksong, they validated marketability & audience many times. Hollow Knight was in Ludum Dare, Newgrounds, festival & conference circuit, Kickstarter, multiple stores & formats.
Why was it standing out then? To me, the coherence of the art, and a game format that aligns with the indie art production and audience validation well.
Consider that larger games are arted by art directors and teams of contractors. If your whole team is excellent and you spend a lot of money rejecting art, okay, you will wind up with something coherent. You can also have 1 person make all the art like Hollow Knight & Silksong.
Indie games - and these guys are actually independently published and actually just 3 people and a handful of contractors - have this superpower. Any 1 person can make all the art for their indie game, and some have found great success doing this, like Stardew Valley. Some people give up a year in, or ten years in, or whatever.
So if you have little trickles of validation along the way, then you actually finish your game, which is maybe why this all worked.
And then this game is a sequence of levels, you can finish all the art for one screen and then move onto the next screen. You can finish a walk cycle going forward, and record the character moving forward in a single background, and it looks like a finished game. A 3D Hero Shooter requires a huge amount of work on level and character art before a preview is fully arted.
https://www.eurogamer.net/whats-so-special-about-the-origina...
Bad planning, maybe but definitely not a conspiracy against the game.
No-preorders is basically same as no-capes. Just don't do it.
* You want them to be as fast as possible (ideally: instantaneous)
* You want them to be validated (long-poll to a third party validation service)
* You need them to be sequentially auditable (this is a "... or you could go to jail" requirement)
* If a failure occurs, you don't want to be out your own money
While these are solvable, it's the reason that so many cloud services suddenly hit scaling issues at the payments layer: things are going great and then that layer gets involved and "oops, hold on, we're waiting on Visa's servers. Still waiting. Stillllll waiiiiiting..........." Or the team was certain they'd simultaneously solved speed and sequential auditability this time but, oops, there's yet another sequencing point that's actually a bottleneck.
But you have a bunch of people on HN opposed to it for no good reason other than "IPv4 works for me™".
This makes sense because there are several live service games on steam that have hundreds of thousands of active players - any update will put a large instantaneous load on the CDN as all the clients are forced to update at the same time, and this happens extremely frequently so they've had to get good at handling it.
What doesn't happen very frequently is hundreds of thousands of people trying to buy a game at exactly the same time, because most games have pre-orders.
I think pay to view events might have hardest time as then there is actual need to be available at that exact time.
True, though many of them have at least an hour or two of intro/opening ceremony/commentary to troubleshoot as people slowly join, so it's not the end of the world if the stream crashes up top.
AndrewDucker•2d ago