Hollow Knight's 15M-copy flywheel: how Team Cherry self-funded seven years of Silksong

Team Cherry is a three-person studio in Adelaide, South Australia that makes Hollow Knight, a hand-drawn Metroidvania for PC, Switch, PS4 and Xbox One, and its sequel Silksong; it funds development from game sales.

That a tiny studio could finance a years-long sequel purely from its own sales, letting Silksong hype sell Hollow Knight instead of taking outside money.

The original game was funded by a 2014 Kickstarter campaign, whose backers were later promised Silksong free; no venture or publisher investment is documented (Nintendo AU, PlayStation LifeStyle).

Hollow Knight began as a game-jam project on the theme "Beneath the Surface" in mid-2014; Team Cherry, a three-person Adelaide studio, grew it into a full game with Kickstarter backer money (Nintendo Australia interview). The game launched in February 2017, passed 1M copies on PC alone in its first year, added Switch in June 2018 and PS4 and Xbox One in September 2018, and reached 2.8M copies across all four platforms by February 2019 (IGN, PlayStation LifeStyle).

In February 2019 Team Cherry announced Silksong, which had started as a Hollow Knight expansion and grown into a full sequel. The announcement started a virtuous loop: sequel hype sold the original, original sales funded more development, and six years of quiet only sharpened demand — unit sales rose from 2.8M to 15M between 2019 and August 2025 (Eurogamer, IGN). Co-founder Ari Gibson told Eurogamer the project was never stuck and had no strict deadline; co-founder William Pellen described a development method where ideas became playable content almost immediately.

As of 2025-08-20 Team Cherry had confirmed 15M copies sold and set Silksong to launch on 2025-09-04 across PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S; the studio remained independent and small, and Gibson told Eurogamer the team was having fun with the work (IGN, Eurogamer).

Silksong anticipation worked as free marketing: each news cycle and each year of meme-worthy silence sold more copies of the original, so demand funded development instead of the other way round.

Owning the product meant every dollar went back to the studio, and with a three-person cost base even multi-year development stayed affordable once the original was a proven hit.

Flat pricing and free expansions removed monetization pressure, so the team never had to ship early or degrade the game to satisfy a revenue target.

No external milestones let the team keep polishing — the reason a sequel that began as an expansion in 2019 could take until September 2025 to arrive without being written off as development hell.

A hit a studio owns outright turns anticipation into working capital: Silksong hype lifted Hollow Knight from 2.8M to 15M sales and funded seven patient years with no investors.

As of 2025-08-20 Team Cherry remains an independent Adelaide studio: Hollow Knight's 15M-copy total is confirmed, and Silksong is set to launch on 2025-09-04 across PC, Switch, Switch 2, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. Co-founder Ari Gibson described the studio as financially free and still enjoying the work; no employee count, revenue figure or roadmap beyond Silksong was disclosed in the sources.