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Sunday, September 14, 2025
The Silksong Controversy
The average game developer, by definition, is mediocre. Talent and skill in any profession are following what is called a normal distribution, or Gaussian distribution. The fact that it is actually called a "normal distribution" tells you how prevalent that sort of distribution is. Game development isn't any different. We, as customers, can certainly testify that there are a lot of games out there that are okay, but not great. Great games are few and far between. 95% of everything on a normal distribution is within 2 standard deviations of average.
What is different in computer game development, compared to let's say building a car, is that the development cost is high, but the so-called "marginal" cost of producing one more copy of your product is negligible. That is a problem for pricing computer games. If it took X people Y years at an annual salary of Z, and you then sell A copies of it for B dollars each, X*Y*Z better be less than A*B, because otherwise you are making a loss and can't keep making games. But you can only set the price, and don't really know for sure how many copies of the game you will be selling.
Team Cherry sold 15 million copies of Hollow Knight. And then made a sequel, which in their opinion was at least as good, and they guessed that it would do similarly well. They were right, Silksong sold 5 million copies in the first week. With Team Cherry being small, although the development time of Silksong was long, they felt that if they priced the game at $20, they would get their development cost paid and make a profit.
And now, in an echo of what triple-A RPG developers said about Baldur's Gate 3, the makers of mediocre indie games are complaining about Silksong. They accuse it of unfairly raising customer expectations of how much indie game you can get for $20. Because if you make a mediocre game, and think it will only sell a few thousand copies, you can't spend that much development time and still make a profit at $20. So now the mediocre indie game developers are outraged that Team Cherry isn't selling Silksong for a much higher price.
To me that sounds a lot like just another variation of the growing sense of entitlement. A lot of people believe that if they do what they love, the world somehow owes them a living. That isn't so. Especially not in any creative profession. Customers highly value excellence in creative arts, and so the 2.3% of people in a normal distribution that produce excellent creative stuff are valued much more highly than the 95.4% that produce the average stuff. There are a lot of other professions where being average is good enough, and you can make a good living without being excellent. But the world doesn't owe you a living, just because you decided to do something creative and aren't all that good at it.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:53 AM Permanent Link
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I saw the title and thought this post was going to be about the games difficulty. I wasn't even aware there was controversy over the games price.
Combining "95% of everything on a normal distribution is within 2 standard deviations of average" and Sturgeon's Law, "ninety percent of everything is crap", gives you an interesting view of just how good something has to be for people online not to deride it as "crap".
On another note, it surprises me that in 2025 someone can still muster up strong feelings about the fact that the price of a game and the "value" of said game are two things which are entirely disconnected from each other. I thought that ship sailed many years ago, when F2P games and creative indie endeavours first butted heads with clunky and derivative "AAA" titles.
On another note, it surprises me that in 2025 someone can still muster up strong feelings about the fact that the price of a game and the "value" of said game are two things which are entirely disconnected from each other. I thought that ship sailed many years ago, when F2P games and creative indie endeavours first butted heads with clunky and derivative "AAA" titles.
I'm not convinced that the Central Limit theorem is generally applicable to game quality (or talent and skill for that matter). People aren't buying Silksong because it scores 95, 90, 91, 86, 89 according to five criteria when another game the same price is only 94, 91, 80, 83, 79. Those are two different games and not really in direct competition. People bought Silksong in droves because it was the hotly anticipated sequel to a well-loved indie game, and - I assume in most cases - because early reviews suggested that the developers had knocked it out of the park again.
I agree about the griping, though. There's no point complaining about someone else being more successful. Successful games only build the market, anyway. This year's best RPGs will sell more as a result of Baldur's Gate 3, and next years Metroidvanias will likely benefit from Silksong.
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I agree about the griping, though. There's no point complaining about someone else being more successful. Successful games only build the market, anyway. This year's best RPGs will sell more as a result of Baldur's Gate 3, and next years Metroidvanias will likely benefit from Silksong.
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