The official release date for Hollow Knight: Silksong has finally been announced as September 4 , 2025, and while the gaming community is buzzing with excitement over the long-awaited sequel to one of the most popular Metroidvania games of the last decade, game developers are apparently concerned. As pointed out by a recent GameSpot report, a number of indie developers have pushed back the releases of their games to avoid being drowned out by the Silksong hype. At least three game developers have publicly announced that their games will be delayed due to the imminent launch of Silksong. Faeland was meant to launch its 1.0 release, but the developer announced on Steam that "Our v1.0 launch was set for Sept 9, but with today's Silksong news we've made the tough call to postpone." Aeternum Game Studios announced on X that Aeterna Lucis would be delayed, adding that "after the announcement of Silksong, we are fully aware that our game wouldn't have the visibility it deserves." Meanwhile, Panik Arcade delayed CloverPit to September 26, adding that "Silksong is the most anticipated and wishlisted game on all of Steam and we think people will love this game and play it right at launch (including us) but that also means it will overshadow all games launching close to it."

In the days since the announcement of Silksong's release date, the original Hollow Knight has broken its previous player-count record, with SteamDB recording a new record of 23,840 concurrent players on August 22, 2025—that's 800 players more than the previous record, which was in mid-2022 at the height of the Steam Deck's popularity. It has also officially sold over 15 million copies ahead of the official launch. We saw a similar series of events play out surrounding the launch of GTA VI, which even resulted in speculation that the fourth installment of one of the biggest looter-shooter franchises to date had been delayed to avoid GTA VI hype. While the games being delayed surrounding the launch of Silksong largely seem to be indie titles, the outsized hype over Silksong, which has been in development for over seven years, has clearly been felt across the industry.