Hollow Knight: Silksong was always going to be a success, and its $20 launch price could be given as one reason why. The much-awaited sequel launched in September 2025 after seven years of development, crashing Steam servers in the process and peaking at more than 580,000 players (on Steam) at launch. But one pricing analyst argues it really could have been a little more expensive.

Cassia Curran is the founder of Curran Games Agency, a consulting and market intelligence firm that offers games industry expertise. It also has a focus on Steam game pricing, with a dedicated Steam Pricing Analyser tool that helps developers and publishers determine how much their upcoming game should cost, based on variables set by close competition and player sentiment.

Should Hollow Knight Silksong have been a little more expensive?

Speaking in the latest edition of The Game Business Show, hosted by Christopher Dring, Curran brings up the topic of ‘patient gamers’ who wait for discounts rather than buying at launch (there’s a large community on Reddit at r/patientgamers). She suggests these players are drawn more to the discount percentage than the price. “They care about whether the game is 50% off rather than whether it’s 10% off,” she says.

Curran suggests it makes sense for publishers to price games at a premium to give them more wiggle room for higher percentage discounts in the future. Using Hollow Knight: Silksong as an example, she says the game’s price “kind of annoyed me,” adding, “Oh god, please price it higher. $24.99 would have made a big difference to a lot of studios that have similar games.”

“Hollow Knight: Silksong, very famous, it’s $20 and it’s a really good title that gives 20-30 hours of gameplay and was in development for seven years. If you’ve got a similar sort of roguelike, then you need to be thinking about, is it going to be priced more than Silksong?”

Cassia Curran, founder of Curran Games Agency

The sentiment is that Silksong set a relatively low barrier of entry for the genre (note: it’s technically a Metroidvania rather than a roguelike), making it harder for similar-sized indie games to make a breakthrough without compromising on the price. The originally Hollow Knight originally launched for $14.99, so the $19.99 price of Silksong was at least a $5 increase in comparison.

It has been over a year since Silksong, and Curran also points towards the growing trend of cheaper indie titles. “I would say there is actually quite a lot of downward pricing pressure, especially with friendslop these days,” she says, referring to cheaply made co-op games, with one of the prime examples being PEAK. One of the developers of PEAK, Nick Kaman, famously explained its $7.99 PC launch price by suggesting it essentially feels like paying $5, while anything higher puts it in the ‘$10 tier’.

With the growing number of AI-generated content found on Steam these days – painfully evident in the ongoing Next Fest – it may only become harder to stand out with premium price tag, especially for indie developers. It’s an even bigger flood of cheaply-made games to compete with, and most likely something Curran Games Agency’s price tracker will have to consider moving forward.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.