After Silksong DLC, Team Cherry Weighs Hollow Knight 3 Against a Brand New Game

Silksong is finally real, its long wait capped off by the surprise confirmation that it will even receive DLC, and yet Team Cherry is already looking further ahead.

The tiny Australian studio behind Hollow Knight is standing at a crossroads: follow Silksong with a full Hollow Knight 3, or walk away from Hallownest to build a brand new world. Whichever they choose, the most sobering detail is that the team is now planning its future in terms of how many games they can realistically make before their lives run out.

In a rare, wide ranging conversation, co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen reflected on the seven-year climb that turned Silksong from a modest follow-up into another full-scale epic. What began as a simple expansion took on a life of its own, layer by layer, until the supposed DLC was indistinguishable from a sequel. For years, fans joked that every new tease was just another silkpost, a meme more than a project. Now that Silksong and its DLC are finally visible on the horizon, the punchline has flipped: people are staring at the announcement and saying, half in disbelief, that this time it might actually be happening.

The studio that measures time in games, not years

Gibson has said that the team does not really think about release schedules in quarters or calendar years. Instead, the harsh reality is that they think in whole projects. If each game is a seven year journey, and you tack on a couple more years for expansions, then even a relatively young creator can only fit a handful of such odysseys into a lifetime. The only real deadline, he jokes with a grim kind of honesty, is death. That is not marketing hyperbole; it is the math of being a small studio making huge, handcrafted experiences.

For a team of their size, every new game is an all-consuming commitment. Long prototyping phases, bespoke art, carefully tuned combat, dense interconnected worlds and dozens of bosses add up to a significant slice of a human lifespan. Choosing to do Hollow Knight 3 would mean not doing something else. Choosing an entirely fresh universe would mean risking the comfort of a beloved brand. When you know you only have so many rolls of the dice left, every concept you greenlight suddenly carries the weight of a legacy.

Hollow Knight 3 or an all-new world?

Right now, Team Cherry has not publicly nailed down its next move. There are ideas for more stories in the Hollow Knight universe, but there are also completely different games outlined in notebooks and documents. The studio is acutely aware that it does not want to be known solely as the Hollow Knight company, even if that bug-filled underground has defined its rise. At the same time, they understand how deeply players have attached themselves to these fragile kingdoms and the strange little creatures that inhabit them.

Whatever form the next project takes, Gibson has hinted that it will still lean on the studio’s strengths: expansive 2D worlds that unfold like intricate mazes, unsettling but charming character designs, exacting combat that rewards precision, and towering boss fights that loom over the player both visually and mechanically. Even if the setting, characters, or genre wrapper change, that sense of being dropped into a vast, half-deciphered ecosystem of secrets is likely to remain the through line.

Silksong itself illustrates how hard it is for Team Cherry to think small. What started as something closer to a traditional DLC ballooned into a fully-fledged adventure because the ideas kept coming and the team chose to chase them. Some fans now half-joke that the announced Silksong DLC could quietly swell in scope yet again, blurring the line between expansion and sequel one more time. Others are simply hoping that Silksong and its add-ons bring a feeling of closure, rather than another teasing little note that says the story will be continued somewhere down the line.

When developers start counting projects to the end of their life

Team Cherry’s candid talk about death as a scheduling factor slots into a broader, increasingly common theme among veteran developers. In recent years, major figures in the industry have openly admitted that the era of decade-long projects has forced them to reckon with time in a way they did not when they were young. Bethesda’s Todd Howard, for example, has mused that The Elder Scrolls 6 might be the last entry in that fantasy saga that he personally oversees, simply because of how long the gaps between games have grown.

For players, that thought hits hard. Skyrim still feels weirdly current in online culture, yet the calendar says it has been well over a decade since its launch. Jokes about waiting endlessly for the next Elder Scrolls, or for Half-Life 3, are no longer just about corporate indecision or perfectionism. They are also about mortality, about the slow realization that creators are aging alongside their audiences and that there may only be space for a few more truly giant projects in any given career.

Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima has been just as frank. After a serious illness and eye surgery during the pandemic, he described being shaken by how quickly the ability to create can vanish. Turning 60 was less of a shock than waking up one day and realizing he physically could not work. In response, he sketched out future game concepts, stored them on a USB stick, and handed it to an assistant like a creative will. His priority was not just preserving his ideas, but ensuring his studio and staff could survive financially if he could no longer be the engine of every project. Even for someone as iconic as Kojima, the question became: how many more games can I reasonably expect to make?

That same question is echoing in Team Cherry’s comments. The studio is not announcing retirement, and there is no morbid countdown clock on their website. But there is a practical acknowledgment that the combination of ambitious design philosophies and long development cycles carries a cost. If each game consumes nearly a decade from first prototype to final patch, you cannot promise fans an endless parade of sequels. You can only promise that whatever you choose to spend that time on will matter deeply to you.

Fans between hype, jokes and the fear of running out of time

Players have responded to these musings about mortality with a mix of gallows humour and genuine concern. In comment threads, people admit that it is a valid worry: if it already feels wild that Skyrim is pushing its mid-teens, how many more enormous RPGs or sprawling Metroidvania epics will we realistically see from the same creators? Others find the framing itself a little unnerving, calling it an unusual way to talk about game development, even if they understand where it comes from.

The Silksong fanbase in particular embodies this mood. Someone will joke that they would not be surprised if the supposed DLC quietly mutates into yet another full-blown sequel, because that is simply how Team Cherry works when inspiration hits. Right below that, another player begs for a clean ending this time instead of yet another dangling thread. Scattered between them are people half-trolling, half-serious, stunned that this latest reveal is not just another elaborate community meme. The conversation is messy, very online, and yet fully aware that everyone involved, from developers to long-time fans, is getting older together.

There is also a quieter emotional undercurrent. Many who fell in love with the first Hollow Knight were students or young professionals at the time, pouring late nights into exploring every corner of Hallownest. Now those same players have families, demanding jobs, less free time, and a sharper sense that they cannot play everything anymore. When they hear developers talk about wanting to fit a few more big swings into their lives, it mirrors their own private math: how many games do I still have the energy to truly lose myself in?

What comes after Silksong

Amid all that reflection, one thing is clear: Team Cherry still wants to build more than one new game. Whether the next project is called Hollow Knight 3 or wears an entirely different name, it will almost certainly be another dense, carefully woven adventure that asks players to pay attention, explore thoroughly, and accept a certain amount of mystery. Gibson has suggested that even if the studio walks away from bugs and brittle kingdoms for a while, it will eventually find reasons to revisit that universe in some form.

That could mean a direct sequel that picks up narrative threads left hanging, a smaller spin-off focused on a specific character, or a more radical reimagining of what a Hollow Knight game can be. On the other side of the decision tree lie brand new settings: different aesthetics, different cultures, maybe even different genres that still carry the studio’s DNA of exploration and tightly tuned combat. The key goal, it seems, is to avoid being boxed in by expectations while also honouring what made the earlier games resonate so strongly.

The practical challenge is to balance ambition with the finite nature of time. Perhaps that will mean deliberately aiming for shorter development cycles, scaling projects down in scope, or alternating between gigantic passion projects and more contained experiments. However they structure it, Team Cherry appears determined to ensure that the remaining games they create are ones they care about deeply, not simply the safest sequels on a spreadsheet.

For now, the immediate future is still wrapped up in Silksong and its promised DLC. Once that chapter closes, the studio will have to decide whether to open the next page in the Hollow Knight saga or sketch a completely fresh map. Either path comes with risk, but also with the thrill of knowing that every new game is another precious use of limited time. In a strange way, embracing that reality may free Team Cherry to be bolder than ever, creating worlds that feel urgent precisely because they cannot make an infinite number of them.