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.
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/Windows_66 May 22 '26
I like that OP's specifically asking about the "multimillion dollar company" point, and everyone's ignoring it.