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Hollow Knight's 15M-copy flywheel: how Team Cherry self-funded seven years of Silksong
Adelaide's three-person Team Cherry grew a 2014 game-jam idea into 15M sales, then let sequel hype fund a seven-year wait with no outside money.
Team Cherry
What the business is
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.
Starting capital：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).
How it started
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).
What happened
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.
How it ended up
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).
Background
Team Cherry is a three-person game studio in Adelaide, South Australia, formed around a shared love of classic adventure games. Its bet was that a small, self-owned team could fund a multi-year project purely from its own sales: Hollow Knight would be sold at a flat price with free expansions, and its sequel would wait until the studio could afford to make it well — no publisher milestones, no venture money.
Hollow Knight started as a game-jam project in mid-2014 on the theme "Beneath the Surface" and grew, with Kickstarter backers, into a full game that launched in February 2017. It sold 1M copies on PC alone in its first year, and its June 2018 Switch launch and September 2018 PS4 and Xbox One releases pushed it to 2.8M copies by February 2019.
That month Team Cherry announced Silksong — originally an expansion, then a full sequel. What followed was a self-reinforcing cycle: the announcement, and then six years of near-silence, kept Hollow Knight in front of players, and each wave of anticipation sold more copies of the original, rising from 2.8M to 15M by August 2025 and funding the long development of the sequel.
Team Cherry co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen told Eurogamer in 2025 that the project was never stuck and carried no strict deadline, and the report describes a lean studio under no pressure to chase trends while larger companies cut staff. On 2025-08-20 Team Cherry confirmed the 15M milestone and set Silksong for release on 2025-09-04.
What has to be true
- 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.
What can be applied
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.
Aftermath
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.
Sources
- Hollow Knight Reaches 15 Million Copies Sold
- No, Silksong hasn't been in development hell, hype skyrocketed sales of the original game to give Team Cherry financial freedom
- Team Cherry Reveals Hollow Knight Sales Have Topped 2.8 Million
- The Metamorphosis of Hollow Knight, with Team Cherry, Aussie Developer Interview
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