Cliff Notes – Silksong so popular video game pirates are telling people to buy it
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Unprecedented Demand: Hollow Knight: Silksong has quickly become a massive hit on Steam, crashing major storefronts upon launch and attracting over 535,000 players within three hours.
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Piracy Paradox: Despite the game’s popularity, many in piracy communities are advocating for legal purchases, highlighting the goodwill of developer Team Cherry and the game’s reasonable price point of around £16.
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Community Support: The game’s reception has been overwhelmingly positive, with nearly 16,000 user reviews on Steam, earning it an ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ status, reflecting strong community backing for the developers.
Silksong so popular video game pirates are telling people to buy it
So far, it’s lived up to the hype (Team Cherry)
The long-awaited Silksong has quickly become a huge hit on Steam, to the point where piracy groups are promising to buy the game legally.
With video games becoming increasingly more expensive, it wouldn’t be surprising if more and more people started turning towards piracy, to play the hottest new releases.
Even with big companies like Nintendo trying to crack down on it, video game piracy will never be stamped out, as long as it’s easier to download a pirate copy than it is to buy a legitimate one.
And yet it appears there are lines video game pirates won’t cross and one of those is Hollow Knight: Silksong.
You already know what a big deal Silksong is, with the sudden announcement of its release date last month prompting many other indie games to push back their release dates, to avoid clashing with it.
The game is so popular that every major storefront crashed the moment it launched, due to the number of people rushing to buy it. However, as was pointed out on a piracy subreddit, someone still managed to acquire and redistribute the game through illegal means not even 15 minutes after launch.
While this was inevitable, and many have no doubt taken advantage of this, it seems the popular opinion of at least one piracy subreddit is that they shouldn’t steal the game.
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‘I’m buying this game on GOG straight away, even though I will probably play it later,’ said one Redditor, with others admitting they had already put money down for it too.
So, what makes Silksong so special? Aside from the general goodwill developer Team Cherry has cultivated (which is a tad funny considering it’s been dead quiet for the past six years), it’s also because the game isn’t particularly expensive at between £15.99 and £16.75, depending on the format.
It’s even been suggested that that’s too low an asking price, with some fearing that this could create unfair expectations for other indie games that cost just as much but don’t offer as much content as Silksong.
‘It’s a three to four person team that has done right by their fans at every turn. Making sure the PC release is DRM free. Making sure all original backers of Hollow Knight get Silksong free on their choice of platform. This is a time where, if we can afford to support them, we should,’ reads a comment with 1,600 upvotes.
One Redditor bluntly wrote, ‘Hey, the game is pretty cheap. This one, we should not pirate,’ while another expressed surprise at how many people on the subreddit agreed with the sentiment.
‘Usually, people here claim that the title, price, or the indie status makes no difference to them, but I guess that Silksong is just that respected,’ they said.
All this points to Silksong being a guaranteed sales success. It’s too soon for Team Cherry to share sales figures, but it was an immediate hit on Steam, attracting over 535,000 players in just three hours according to SteamDB.
At the time of writing, it’s the third most played game on Steam, at just under 312,000 concurrent players, losing only to long running multiplayer juggernauts Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2. Which is impressive considering Silksong is a purely single-player game.
Although there are no critical reviews, due to Team Cherry not sending out review codes, Silksong has earned an ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ status on Steam based on nearly 16,000 user reviews. Although most of those were written in the first hour after it was released.
Have you already bought Silksong? (Team Cherry)
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