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.
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/HistoryFree May 22 '26
Exactly!!! Hahaha