Inside Team Cherry: Beyond Hollow Knight and Silksong

Team Cherry, the small Australian studio behind Hollow Knight and its much-anticipated follow-up Hollow Knight: Silksong, has become one of the most closely watched indie developers in the world. Their games are known for meticulous design, atmospheric worlds, and a level of polish rarely seen outside large AAA studios. Yet the studio’s recent comments about future projects reveal an underlying tension: how do you plan a future beyond a beloved franchise when each game can take most of a decade to create?

This article explores the ideas raised in that discussion: the weight of long development cycles, the desire to move beyond a single universe, the human reality of limited time, and what Team Cherry’s situation says about indie game development as a whole.

The Indie Studio That Accidentally Became a Titan

When Hollow Knight launched in 2017, Team Cherry was a tiny studio operating on a modest Kickstarter budget and an outsized ambition. The game slowly built word-of-mouth momentum, eventually selling millions of copies and becoming a modern benchmark for Metroidvania design. Major outlets now rank it alongside the genre’s greats for its intricate map design, tightly tuned combat, and layered storytelling.

That unexpected success transformed Team Cherry from a niche passion project into a flagship name in indie gaming. With that status came new expectations: players wanted more content, more games, and above all, a sequel that could stand alongside or even surpass the original.

Silksong began life as a planned expansion for Hollow Knight, but according to the studio’s official communications, the scope kept growing until it naturally evolved into a full sequel with a new kingdom, protagonist, and systems.¹ That evolution illustrates one of the studio’s core traits: they prefer to keep building until a game feels complete, even if it means longer timelines.

Why Silksong Takes So Long: Craft Over Speed

To understand why a project like Silksong can span years, it helps to look at how studios structure development. Indie teams with fewer people often compensate with longer schedules. They can’t simply add dozens of new artists, programmers, or QA testers, so improvements mainly come from time, iteration, and careful scope management.

Several factors naturally stretch a game like Silksong into a many-year effort:

• High asset quality – Hand-drawn art, original sound design, and custom animation all demand intensive manual work.
• Interconnected level design – Metroidvania maps require careful planning so routes, shortcuts, and progression all interlock rather than feeling like separate levels.
• Systemic combat and movement – Fine-tuning movesets, enemy behaviors, and difficulty curves takes repeated testing and refinement.
• Platform support – Ensuring the game runs smoothly on multiple consoles and PC platforms multiplies QA work substantially.

The broader game industry offers context. Studies of development schedules for big-budget titles show increasingly long production times as games add features and platforms.² While indies operate with fewer resources, they face similar complexity when trying to ship polished, content-rich experiences.

“We Have Other Games We Want to Make”

In interviews, Team Cherry has hinted that their ambitions extend beyond the bug-filled kingdoms of Hollow Knight. They’ve mentioned having ideas for projects that are not just more games in the same universe, but entirely new concepts. Whether those ideas are smaller experimental titles or another large-scale adventure, the intention is clear: they don’t want to be creatively confined to a single series forever.

This desire is common among successful indie teams. After a breakout hit, studios often face a fork in the road:

• Stay with the franchise that fans already love.
• Branch out into new genres, worlds, or styles.

Both paths carry risk. Staying with one franchise can lead to creative stagnation and fan fatigue. Switching to something new, on the other hand, risks alienating players who mostly want “more of the same, but bigger.”

Team Cherry seems interested in balancing both: delivering on expectations for Silksong while still leaving room for original ideas that go beyond Hallownest and Pharloom.

The Weight of Time: When Seven Years Becomes a Pattern

One of the most striking ideas raised in the recent coverage of Team Cherry is the simple arithmetic of long-term game development. If each major project takes six or seven years from conception to release, and the team wants to create multiple large games, they are implicitly dealing with the reality that they may only produce a handful of such titles in their entire careers.

In practical terms, a small studio might only have time for:

• A debut game that establishes their name.
• One or two follow-up projects that either expand the brand or explore new directions.
• Possibly one late-career passion project if the team remains intact and financially stable.

This isn’t just a business problem; it’s a deeply personal one. Developers know that every long project they undertake is a multi-year commitment that can overlap with major life events, from starting families to changing health. That awareness makes each decision about scope and direction heavier: choosing to spend seven years on one idea effectively means saying no to several other ideas.

How Long Dev Cycles Shape Creative Choices

Extended dev cycles influence both the design and the psychology of a team:

• Risk tolerance shrinks – When each experiment must sustain years of work and pay the bills, teams may hesitate to pursue radical concepts.
• Scope tends to grow – Once a project has consumed several years, there is pressure to turn it into a “definitive” release to justify the investment.
• Burnout risk increases – Long stretches in the same codebase, art style, or world can be creatively draining, especially for small teams handling many roles.

Academic research on game developers notes that crunch and extended overtime exacerbate mental health problems and burnout, especially in smaller studios that lack institutional HR support.³ While Team Cherry has not positioned itself as a crunch-heavy studio, they still operate in a landscape where long projects can be emotionally and physically taxing.

Fans, Expectations, and the Sequel Trap

Once a game becomes a phenomenon, every subsequent project has to contend with a vast and vocal audience. Expectations for Silksong are unusually high, especially given the original game’s reputation for quality and value. Social media, forums, and community spaces keep the conversation alive for years, generating both hype and pressure.

This environment creates what many studios describe as the “sequel trap”:

• Players expect the sequel to be larger, denser, and more surprising.
• Any delay fuels speculation about trouble behind the scenes.
• The studio feels they cannot ship anything less than a near-flawless experience.

Major developers have openly discussed how this pressure can distort production. For instance, CD Projekt’s postmortems around Cyberpunk 2077 highlighted how expectations following The Witcher 3 contributed to an overly ambitious scope and difficult launch.⁴ While Team Cherry operates at a much smaller scale, the psychological dynamics are similar: the desire to meet or exceed fan expectations can lead to more ambition, longer development, and delayed releases.

Planning a Future Beyond Hollow Knight

Given all these forces, how might Team Cherry realistically approach life after Silksong? While the studio has not laid out a public roadmap, we can consider some likely strategies based on industry patterns and their own comments about wanting to make other games.

Potential Strategies for Team Cherry’s Next Steps

Which mix they choose will likely depend on how Silksong performs, how sustainable their current workflow feels, and how strongly they want to explore new ideas while they’re still in their most active years as developers.

The Human Side of a Small Studio’s Legacy

When developers talk about “their own deaths weighing on them,” they are pointing at an uncomfortable but honest truth: creative careers are finite. Unlike large corporations, where franchises can theoretically continue indefinitely with rotating staff, a small founder-led team must face the fact that the studio and the people behind it are tightly bound. If the founders retire, burn out, or move on, that artistic voice may effectively fall silent.

This realization often pushes small studios to think in terms of legacy:

• What do we want to be remembered for?
• How many big, ambitious projects can we realistically complete?
• Is it better to focus on one universe and perfect it, or to explore multiple ideas more lightly?

For Team Cherry, Hollow Knight has already secured them a place in gaming history. Silksong will likely define the next chapter of that legacy. The question that remains is whether they will use the cultural capital from these games to experiment widely, or whether the enduring pull of their signature world will keep drawing them back to it.

What Team Cherry’s Situation Reveals About Indie Game Dev

While much of the conversation centers on Silksong, the underlying themes apply broadly to indie development:

• Scale vs. sustainability – As indie games chase higher production values, dev times stretch and risks grow.
• Fandom as both support and pressure – Dedicated communities provide financial stability but also intensify expectations around scope and quality.
• Finite creative time – Small studios cannot endlessly spin up new teams; each big project is a significant slice of their creative lifespan.

Reports from organizations like the IGDA (International Game Developers Association) show recurring concerns about crunch, work-life balance, and unstable careers in game development.⁵ While success stories like Hollow Knight showcase the upside, Team Cherry’s reflections remind us that even the most celebrated teams operate under hard constraints of time and human limits.

What This Means for Players

From a player’s perspective, all of this may sound abstract; what matters most is whether Silksong and whatever comes after it are enjoyable. But understanding the realities behind these games can reshape how we interpret delays, scope changes, or long periods of silence.

When a small studio takes extra time, it might mean:

• They are refusing to compromise on quality or design coherence.
• They are avoiding harsh crunch that would harm the team long-term.
• They are carefully choosing how to spend years of their lives.

For fans invested in Team Cherry’s work, patience isn’t just an act of kindness; it’s an investment in the conditions that allow a studio to build richly imagined worlds without burning out. The more we acknowledge the finite nature of creative time, the clearer it becomes that each game from a small studio is not just a product, but a multi-year chapter of someone’s life.

Key Takeaways

• Team Cherry has expressed interest in making games beyond the Hollow Knight universe, but long dev cycles make each project a major life commitment.
• Silksong evolved from an expansion into a full-scale sequel, exemplifying how scope growth and quality standards extend timelines.
• The studio’s situation highlights broader indie dev challenges: balancing ambition, sustainability, fan expectations, and the finite length of a creative career.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does Hollow Knight: Silksong seem to be taking so many years?

Silksong is an ambitious sequel built by a small team that prioritizes handcrafted content and tight design. As the scope of the game grew from an expansion to a full sequel, the time required for art, level design, QA, and multi-platform support naturally increased. Long dev cycles are common for high-quality indie titles, especially when studios refuse to cut corners.

Is Team Cherry only going to make Hollow Knight games?

No. The studio has spoken about ideas for games beyond the Hollow Knight universe and has indicated that they don’t want their entire career to be defined by a single series. However, the length of their dev cycles means they must choose future projects carefully, since each new game can represent many years of work.

Does a long development time mean a game is in trouble?

Not necessarily. Extended timelines can result from expanded scope, higher quality targets, or a deliberate decision to avoid crunch and protect the team. While delays can sometimes signal problems, they can also reflect a desire to ship a polished game instead of rushing to meet an arbitrary date.

How does being a small studio affect Team Cherry’s future?

As a small team, Team Cherry has limited manpower but strong creative control. That structure lets them craft distinctive games, but it also means they can only handle a few large projects in their careers. Decisions about whether to make another Hollow Knight, a new IP, or smaller side projects have long-lasting consequences for the studio’s legacy.

What can players do to support studios like Team Cherry?

Players can support small studios by buying their games (ideally at or near launch), recommending them to others, and giving constructive feedback instead of harassment when delays or changes occur. Understanding that each long project is a major life investment for the developers can help foster healthier expectations and conversations.