Hell is Us developer voices frustrations with Hollow Knight: Silksong’s surprise launch

Hollow Knight: Silksong had an absolutely massive launch on September 4, which disrupted digital gaming storefronts; several games were preemptively delayed to avoid that debacle. Other games stuck around and decided to launch the same week as Hollow Knight: Silksong. Now, the director of one of those games is speaking out about Hollow Knight Silksong’s impact.

Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, director of Rogue Factor and Nacon’s eerie action game Hell is Us, commented on how Team Cherry announced Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release date so close to launch and how it may have impacted Hell is Us’ performance. It’s a first indication that Hollow Knight: Silksong may have had a negative impact on the game’s launching around it, even from bigger publishers.

What did Hell is Us’ game director say about Hollow Knight: Silksong?

He called the last-minute release date announcement “a little callous”

Hell is Us was developed by Rogue Factor, published by Nacon, and launched on September 4. I played some of it, and what stood out the most about the game was how it refused to hold the player’s hand. It lacks the map markers and over-tutorialization common in most games of its ilk. Instead, Hell is Us rewards player curiosity and intuition.

It’s a neat game, but many of those same compliments could also be given to Hollow Knight: Silksong. That’s why coming out on the same day as Team Cherry’s latest seemed particularly rough. Jonathan Jacques-Belletête was interviewed on the Friends Per Second podcast (via This Week in Videogames), and they directly asked him about how he reacted to learning Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hell is Us were coming out on the same date, just two weeks before launch.

Jacques-Belletête admitted that Rogue Factor and Nacon did discuss that. While he admitted that Team Cherry was allowed to do what they did, he seemed a little disappointed in what Team Cherry had done. “When you know you’re that big, I think a shadow drop is a bit like ‘wow.'” He went on to call Hollow Knight Silksong the GTA 6 of indie games and reiterated his opinion that to “shadow drop something like this is a little callous.”

He also provided some more insight into why Hell is Us didn’t delay. Doing so would’ve been “a pretty big endeavor” and would have opened up Rogue Factor and Nacon to having to handle things like refunding pre-orders. The team was also confident enough in their own game’s ability to “get through the storm.”

Directly asked about Hollow Knight: Silksong’s impact on Hell is Us’ launch performance and success, Jacques-Belletête guessed that it probably did, although he didn’t solely blame that game alone :

“I can’t prove it. I don’t have any specific numbers, at least not at this time, but I mean for sure. For sure it did. But it’s not just Silksong. A lot of things ended up [launching then]. It was Cronos [The New Dawn]. It was busy, and that’s the thing nowadays. Getting a window where you’re pretty much alone is almost impossible. I remember 15 years ago mid and end of summer was always kind of like a dead period, but there’s no such things anymore. It’s constant madness.”

We’ll likely have to wait longer before we get any specific sales data for games released the same week as Hollow Knight: Silksong. Still, Jacques-Belletête’s comments show that the anxiety around the game’s surprise launch was felt by developers just as much as it was by players.

As Jacques-Belletête said, there’s no quiet period for video game launches anymore. Something big may always be around the corner. Of course, most developers hope they get a little more than two weeks’ warning about such a game launch.