Delays to escape the shadow of a launch like Silksong are about way more than just day 1 players: 'Every game has to fight and use whatever edge they've got available to stay visible'

The number of games that have scurried away from Silksong's surprise September 4 launch date in the past week have given it the air of a mini GTA 6: an event seemingly so all-consuming that no game stands a chance of competing. But what does competing mean, exactly, when the game in question is a 2D platformer sequel with a cult-like following?

Of the delayed games, you can easily see why 2D adventure RPG Faeland would be sweating; same with metroidvania sequel Aeterna Lucis. But what about the games that are less obviously aimed at the same exact players? Shouldn't they be fine even if Silksong's a mega hit, considering there are more PC gamers than ever?

"You can go to the likes of GameDiscoverCo and look at data for past high-performing titles with similar release dates until your corneas crumple to try and discern the material effects of 'audience overlap,'" says Brian Kwek, the head of Demonschool's indie publisher Ysbryd Games. On Monday, Kwek was the one who posted that "after much anguished consideration," Demonschool was being delayed to November 19 to give it a better shot at success. He elaborated on that decision-making process for PC Gamer to explain how much rides on getting a release date right beyond where players will dedicate their time first.

"With Demonschool and Silksong both being multi-platform simultaneous releases, we have to consider more than 'just' the Steam algorithm, so this ultimately requires us to consider the impact of Silksong on the console gamer audience and how they're hearing about games like Demonschool through broader coverage from content creators and press," Kwek says. Streamers are a key avenue for indie games like Demonschool to get noticed, and as with other Ysbryd published games like World of Horror, it's more likely to be noticed by "variety" streamers who bounce between games rather than focusing on a particular genre or live service titan.

"Unless said creator is known to be a fiend for Shin Megami Tensei or tactics games, we would directly have to compete against Silksong for those creators' time and attention," Kwek says. "Ultimately, at least for the first week of Silksong's release, we think a good majority of creators/streamers and press are going to feel incentivized to meet the demand for Silksong discourse. Even if it's just a week, that's a week that Demonschool—or any game still holding on to the September 3/4 release date—would have been cut off from building their own critical mass of discourse about their own game. I think that can be fatal in this saturated market, where every game has to fight and use whatever edge they've got available to stay visible."

Ysbryd and Demonschool developer Necrosoft Games' choice of September 3 was based on careful consideration of more than just competing games: it followed the news deluge of Gamescom and PAX West in late August, but predated an extremely busy October that includes the remastered Final Fantasy Tactics, a Steam Next Fest and loads of spooky stuff timed to Halloween.

Despite Steam Next Fest being a prime opportunity for developers to get eyeballs on their upcoming games, it can be "a black hole of visibility for game launches," Kwek says, "that is maybe almost as deadly (if not more deadly) than launching next to Silksong."

Publishers like Ysbryd know that delays come with their own downsides, though, including disappointing or angering players who had their expectations upended; those reactions make him feel "miserable." There's also a load of stress that comes with reaching out to partners like PlayStation, Nintendo and Xbox to see if a last-minute delay is even feasible.

"I've spent the last week with my guts twisted up in anxiety when seeing notes from gatekeepers who were one step from telling us 'no, the release date change actually can't be done due to policy X,'" he says.

"Of course, marketing plans and activations have to be delayed; if you've arranged for streams from content creators who've blocked time for you, those all have to be rearranged on their schedules. As I mentioned in our public statement, review keys had gone out to press and creators, who all have to agree to reorganize their time with the game and when to file their stories and video coverage. This delay is a massive inconvenience for nearly everyone involved (and probably took a couple years off my life in the process); if we didn't see value in pursuing it, we'd have just stayed put!"

Any time a game with a previously announced release date is delayed, you can bet a similar degree of hand-wringing went into the decision, says Adam Lieb, the founder and CEO of game marketing platform Gamesight.

"When I see backlash, I'm like—[the studio] sat in a room and sweated about this for two weeks," he says. "This is a really important decision, could be the difference between success and failure, and oftentimes it's a really expensive decision. I think that's one thing that often isn't considered by, like, Reddit: You build a game to launch on a certain date, and build to how much it costs to make that game. When I delay a game a month, I have to pay that entire team a whole extra month with zero revenue coming in the door. That's really fucking expensive."

And the bigger the game, the costlier the move: triple-A games that buy TV commercial slots or billboards in advance have to pay a fee to move those ads or even forfeit the money altogether.

But there is one more layer to the release-date-delay-decisionmaking dance, and that's the potential benefit from launching in the afterglow of a big, eyeball-drawing launch.

"It's a pretty well-known phenomenon that when the biggest games of the year launch on Steam everyone makes more money," Lieb says. "There are just more people on Steam in that window; that's eyeballs on your stuff, on all the algorithmic ranking pages, people in the desktop app, which can lead to more sales."

To use a crude blast zone analogy, once you're outside the 'ground zero' radius of a game like Silksong landing, a game going after the same target audience could stand to benefit from its impact.

"You're getting people who are in the mood for this one thing… when Oblivion [Remastered] came out and Expedition 33 came out, you could say 'Oblivion's so huge, nobody's going to play this other game'—I played them both basically at the same time," he says. "Oblivion definitely is what got me in an RPG mood, and I stayed in that RPG mood. … Sometimes the competition helps you."

Launching a game at just the right time seems like it's about as easy as landing a space shuttle in a driveway while wearing oven mitts. Even when you do your best to plan ahead, there's always a chance things will go comically wrong. Ysbryd and Necrosoft actually did try to account for the possibility of a Silksong surprise launch at Gamescom or a release date announcement, but figured the latter would be at least a month out.

"In this situation, it's impossible to know what the 'right' answer is," he says. "I just pray that we are able to do our best to get eyes onto Demonschool with the audiences who'll dig it!"