A timeline: Why Hollow Knight Silksong took so long, and how fans misread the silence

The wait for Silksong tested players’ patience, but for Team Cherry it was years of careful craft, not development hell.

After six years of speculation, clown noses, and daily “no news” updates, Hollow Knight: Silksong is finally arriving on 4 September 2025. 

The announcement came during Gamescom on 21 August, with Team Cherry confirming the long-awaited sequel to Hollow Knight through a brand-new trailer.

For fans who have endured more than six years of silence, the announcement marks the end of one of the longest waits in recent gaming history, during which Silksong became the most wish-listed game on Steam and a running joke across livestream chats: “Silksong when?”

Not development hell, but creative freedom

Long development cycles in the games industry often raise red flags about mismanagement, burnout, or troubled production. Yet, according to a Bloomberg interview with Team Cherry co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen, that was never the case for Silksong.

“It was never stuck or anything,” Gibson said. “It was always progressing. It’s just the case that we’re a small team, and games take a lot of time.”

Instead of problems behind the scenes, the wait came from the team’s insistence on making the game exactly as they envisioned. For them, the process remained joyful throughout.

A Hornet-starring DLC that turned into full-fledged sequel

When Hollow Knight launched in 2017, it quickly became a breakout indie success. Millions were drawn to its vast bug-filled world, precise combat, and haunting atmosphere. By 2018, with a Switch port boosting momentum, the game had sold millions of copies worldwide.

Team Cherry initially planned a Hornet expansion DLC, but by February 2019 the scope had grown too large. The studio announced that it would instead become a full sequel in a blog post.

Nintendo later shared Hollow Knight: Silksong's first-ever trailer:

Even then, Gibson and Pellen thought the project would be smaller in scale. Instead, the game expanded to rival, and possibly surpass, the original in size, with elaborate quest systems, multiple towns, and a bigger world than they had initially imagined.

A small team with a growing game

Unlike many studios that balloon in size to meet deadlines, Team Cherry chose to remain small. The core team, Gibson, Pellen, programmer Jack Vine, and composer Christopher Larkin, expanded only with a few contractors for testing and additional programming.

At first, the team had been transparent with Hollow Knight: Silksong updates, but by late 2019, they decided to stop posting regular blog posts. Their last developer update went up in December 2019, after which silence became the default. “We felt like continued updates were just going to sour people on the whole thing,” Gibson said. “Because all we could really say is, ‘We’re still working on it.’”

They also wanted to avoid spoilers, believing that part of Hollow Knight’s magic came from players stumbling across secrets with no forewarning. Another reason Silksong took so long was financial stability. During Hollow Knight's development, the team sometimes lived on leftovers and small family handouts. But since its release, the indie hit has gone on to sell more than 15 million copies, Gibson and Pellen told Bloomberg.

When Silksong was first announced in 2019, sales stood at 2.8 million. In the years since, the game sold another 12 million, giving Team Cherry the security to focus on development without chasing deadlines or outside funding.

The 2022 Xbox False Alarm

The long wait wasn’t helped by mixed signals from elsewhere in the industry. In 2022, Silksong resurfaced at an Xbox showcase, where Microsoft promised that all titles shown would be released within a year:

Fans expected the game before June 2023, but that deadline came and went. Pellen recalled, “There was a period of two to three years when I thought it was going to come out within a year.” This, however, made fans even more disappointed, to the point that they started poking fun at the unreleased game.

The fan anticipation that later turned into a flurry of memes

While Team Cherry quietly toiled away, the internet spun that silence into a playful, communal spectacle, turning to memes and poking fun as a way to cope with their disappointment with the lack of news about the game over the years.

The r/Silksong subreddit became ground zero for “silkposts,” fake news and fanfiction that served as a sly wink to the community’s collective anticipation. Perhaps the most iconic meme to spring from this era was the “clown nose.” Whenever a major games showcase came and went without Silksong, fans would humorously post clown makeup on Hornet or the Knight, as self-aware, tongue-in-cheek despair captured in a single image. 

Gibson and Pellen say they mostly avoided reading the comments, but some meme gems got forwarded to them by friends.

“It’s nice that people are passionate about the game, and that they’ve obviously formed their own strange or very exciting communities around it,” Gibson said, but also added that it felt “like we’re going to ruin their fun by releasing the game,” Pellen said.

Sleuthing through the years

From 2019, Silksong fans kept on finding (and sometimes demanding) every crumb related to Hollow Knight: Silksong year after year, consistently flooding game show livestreams with questions of “Silksong when?”

Fan-run YouTube channel Daily Silksong News stuck to its ritual, posting every day with messages like, “There has been no news to report for Silksong today.” After almost 1,700 days, PC Gamer reported that its creator is finally ready to hang up the hat, now that the release date is set. 

2025 finally brought real signs of life. In January, co-director William Pellen changed his profile picture on X of a simple photo of a chocolate cake, harmless at first glance, until fans tied it to the Nintendo Switch 2 reveal. 

Sure enough, Silksong appeared during April’s Nintendo Direct with a 2025 release window. The game later cropped up in an Xbox Wire blog post, was confirmed to have a playable demo at an Australian museum this September, and resurfaced again in a new trailer tied to the reveal of the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X handhelds.

The sleuthing did not stop there. Silksong was confirmed to be playable at Gamescom 2025, and sharp-eyed Redditors noticed its soundtrack quietly appear on the backend of GOG in recent weeks, hinting that preparations were already in motion behind the scenes. 

And finally, at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2025, the meme came full circle: host Geoff Keighley posted a photo sporting a literal clown nose just before the show, and the fandom lost it, in the best way. 

Because later on, Gamescom 2025 was finally the event that saw Team Cherry confirm news of the game’s release date. Granted, it happened during an unrelated online presentation in the week of Gamescom–not exactly as a part of the event itself.

What comes after release

Now, with Silksong set for release, Team Cherry is already looking ahead. Far from being burned out, the team is excited to keep expanding the game.

“The most interesting thing now is what can we add to it next,” Gibson said. “We got a plan. Admittedly, some of the plans for that stuff are kind of ambitious as well, but hopefully we can achieve some of it.”

After 2,391 days, the wait is almost over. The hype, the disappointment, the jokes, the clown noses, the endless “Silksong when?” copium chants; all of it has led to this moment. In just a few days, Hornet’s long-awaited adventure will finally begin.

Hollow Knight: Silksong will release on 4 September, 2025 at 10:00 PM SGT or 11PM JST or 4:00 PM CEST or 7:00 AM PT, and will be available for US$19.99 in the United States, €19.99 in Europe and ¥2300 in Japan. 

The game will be available on Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, and via Xbox Game Pass on day one.