The low price of Hollow Knight: Silksong has caused concern among indie developers, SEGA veterans discussed crunch time in the company during the 1990s and 2000s, and the daily active audience for Grow a Garden has reached 60 million people — a brief summary of the main events in the gaming industry over the past weekend.
- A discussion has erupted in the indie community regarding the low price of Hollow Knight: Silksong — it is set at $20. Some independent teams are concerned that gamers' perception of game value might be distorted, leading them to expect similar projects not to exceed $20. Specifically, these concerns were shared by the writer and game director of Unbeatable, who believes Team Cherry should have priced Hollow Knight: Silksong at $40. The creators of Star Birds stated they have already considered the hyped-up metroidvania's price when determining their project's pricing, and the creators of Lone Fungus: Melody of Spores are no longer confident they can charge $20 for their game, which is completed faster than Hollow Knight: Silksong. However, not everyone shares this viewpoint. For instance, the creator of Citizen Sleeper is convinced that the low price of Hollow Knight: Silksong will not lead to significant consequences for the gaming market. He argues that this would require not just Team Cherry, but hundreds of indie developers to sell content-rich games at low prices.
- Continuing with the topic of Hollow Knight: Silksong, it's notable that the game's peak online user count on Steam has reached new record highs. On Saturday, September 6, it climbed to 587,150 players — the 17th highest in Steam history. Amid the excitement surrounding the sequel, the first Hollow Knight also improved its online numbers on Valve's platform, attracting 95,655 players simultaneously.
- In the 1990s and 2000s, SEGA employees regularly worked overtime, revealed in an interview with 4Gamer by three company veterans: Toru Ohara, Takaharu Terada, and Toru Yoshida. According to them, crunch time was so widespread that offices were equipped with special rooms where developers could spend the night. Sometimes there were not enough places, so some employees created "sleep nests" on the floor or chairs. In some cases, especially committed developers practically lived at work, going home only on weekends. Fortunately, over the years, the situation at SEGA improved. As Terada recalls, sleep rooms began to disappear from offices around 2012. This was largely due to changes in Japanese labor laws, but the growth of SEGA also helped deal with crunch time. Once the company employed more people, the need to work 24 hours a day disappeared.
- The head of Splitting Point Studios, Janzen Madsen, in a conversation with GamesBeat boasted about the DAU size of the Roblox hit Grow a Garden. He stated that approximately 60 million people play Grow a Garden daily. For comparison, the average DAU of the entire Roblox in April-June 2025 was 111.8 million people.