Hollow Knight: Silksong has unsurprisingly appeared on pirate websites in no seconds flat, but the game has also done what some media executives would incorrectly call impossible: get people to buy it legitimately anyway.
Some people will pirate things they don't even want just because they can or just to prove some unknown point, and some people genuinely don't have any other option logistically or financially. But I remain firm in my belief that the overwhelming majority of people will readily pay for a good, convenient, and affordable official option rather than going through the risk and rigamarole of piracy.
And Silksong is nothing if not good (based on our early launch impressions and previous Silksong hands-on preview), convenient, and affordable. It's only $20, it's on every platform under the sun (including Xbox Game Pass), and there's a DRM-free version available for folks who are invested in that (this is also probably why it was cracked so quickly). Team Cherry has ticked pretty much every possible box for turning pirates into paying customers, and it seems to have worked on some people.
Discussions in the 2.4 million-strong Piracy subreddit provide anecdotal but interesting evidence for how such games are received. One of the community's hottest posts of today has seen loads of people come out to support buying the game rather than pirating it, even if the option exists. This isn't entirely unusual for this community or similar piracy groups, as few people debate this stuff more than pirates, but the intensity and verbiage surrounding Silksong stands out.
"Game is way cheaper than a lot of people expected and they probably didn't plant much anti-piracy measures, cus happy customers usually wont pirate," argues top commenter SRETO05SRB.
"It's a 3-4 person team that has done right by their fans at every turn," echoes No-Shape6053. "Making sure the PC release is DRM free. Making sure all original backers of Hollow Knight get Silksong free on their choice of platform. This is a time where if we can afford to support them, we should."
"I did the same with Hollow Knight," says OlavoBilac. "Once I got the money, I bought it."
"Hey the game is pretty cheap," adds Sythrin. "This one, we should not pirate."
And on and on. There are, of course, some people saying the opposite in so many words, 'This is a piracy community and you shouldn't feel bad about pirating things.' This is a very small sample of people – and pirates will be a very small percentage of Silksong players – but the pro-payment sentiments have been supported by thousands, and they align with similar remarks about why people do or don't pirate things.
More than anything, I just think this response to Silksong is a good demonstration of piracy as an experience to beat rather than a plague to cure. Similar conversations have sprung up in other pirate groups.
Plenty of game devs have previously come out and said, hey, just pirate our game, either because they don't care, they still want people who can't afford it to be able to play, or because piracy is arguably the moral high ground in some extremes.
At the same time, creators want to be – and should be – paid for their work. But more than one truth can exist, and piracy isn't necessarily the boogeyman it's sometimes made out to be. It's definitely avoidable, and it feels like I've seen pro-consumer measures beat anti-piracy ones more often than not.
I don't remember Team Cherry making any piracy comments on the record, but the studio is clearly down with a DRM-free release, and with 15 million copies of Hollow Knight sold and Silksong already torching player records so hard it crashed digital storefronts, I doubt the studio is going to feel any hurt here.
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