Hollow Knight: Silksong for just $20? In this economy? It sounds too good to be true, but GameStop says it's so

An edited image of Nosk from Hollow Knight with the Silksong cover art in place of its head.
(Image credit: Team Cherry)

Folks, they're calling it the steal of the century. The unbeatable deal. A throwback to a better time, before the world was ravaged by tariffs, gachaflation and out of control cost of living increases. Could it be true?

Could Hollow Knight: Silksong really go on sale next Thursday for a mere 19 dollars and 99 cents?

So claims Gamestop (as spotted by ResetEra poster --R), which has listed a pre-order for the Switch version of the game for that frankly devastating price. Devastating for the perceived value proposition of nearby indies, I mean, given that what we've seen of Silksong seems to indicate it'll be as big or not bigger than its predecessor. That pegs it at a minimum 30 hours of adventuring just to make it to the end, and probably double that to poke into every nook and cranny.

Hour count ain't everything, of course, but expectations are that after seven years Team Cherry's probably got a pretty good game on its hands. Selling it for $19.99—just 22 cents more than Hollow Knight's $14.99 launch price, according to an online inflation calculator—feels like just as much of a flex as announcing a release date two weeks out after years of working in silence. No doubt a substantial number of players who planned to wait for Silksong's first sale will now see it as an irresistible impulse buy.

Not since Terraria have we seen such a deal.

Okay, maybe not since Vampire Survivors have we seen such a deal.

But hey, maybe I'm looking at this all wrong. Silksong at $20 isn't making other games look overpriced by comparison; it's freeing up dollars that players had already mentally set aside to be spent on another game!

This is actually great news for every game that decided to delay to escape Silksong's release date. Whether you thought Silksong would cost a generous $25, reasonable $30 or confident $40, you've just gotten back some imaginary money you never actually spent.

Might as well throw CloverPit in your cart now; that sucker's only 10 bucks.

As far as I know, there's no reason to doubt the GameStop listing's accuracy: this isn't a placeholder page for a distant game pegged to an end-of-year release date, the way we sometimes see on retail sites. But we won't know for sure what the game will cost on PC until the price appears on Steam. With no pre-order available, that might not happen until the moment sales begin on September 4.

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Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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