Team Cherry
CompanyAustralia · Founded 2014
Documents about Team Cherry
"Is Donald Trump Woke?" and Other Trolling Questions: Rise and Fall of the Woke Content Detector Steam Group
This paper examines the Steam group "Woke Content Detector" (WCD), created in March 2024 with the stated aim of compiling a list of video games containing "woke content," and its transformation after the unexplained disappearance of its founder, Furin, in May 2025, when the group had reached about 3,500 members.
- The Steam group "Woke Content Detector" was created in March 2024 to compile video games it deemed to contain "woke content," and it grew to about 3,500 members before its founder, Furin, unexplainedly disappeared in May 2025.
- After Furin's departure, trolls invaded the group and used irony, mockery, and "flooding" rather than insults to disrupt serious discussion, producing debates that advanced little because each camp's premises remained irreconcilable.
- The group's central difficulty was defining "wokism": original members struggled to distinguish genuine allies from imitators, and some left while others sought to reassert control over the definition.
GMTK Digest: December 2025
The December 2025 industry digest serves as a year-end retrospective, focusing on the critical reception of major game releases as highlighted by the 2025 Game Awards.
- Nintendo utilized specific design methodologies for the 2025 release of Donkey Kong Bananza, serving as a primary case study for industry production philosophies.
- Team Cherry’s development process for Hollow Knight Silksong is highlighted as a key reference point for understanding the year's most acclaimed game production cycles.
- Doom: The Dark Ages set a new industry benchmark for the implementation and advancement of accessibility features in high-budget titles.
Metroidvania Ecologies: Exploration and the Environmental Imagination in Hollow Knight and Rain World
"Metroidvania Ecologies" argues that the Metroidvania genre, and specifically Hollow Knight (2017) and Rain World (2017), deserves a central place in ecogaming scholarship, which has so far concentrated on titles such as SimCity, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Kentucky Route Zero.
- The report argues that the Metroidvania genre, particularly Hollow Knight (2017) and Rain World (2017), deserves a central place in ecogaming scholarship, which has so far focused on titles like SimCity, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Kentucky Route Zero.
- The authors contend that the genre's interconnected, gated level design, with recursive exploration, backtracking, and gradual unlocking of space, parallels Gibsonian ecological relations between organism and environment.
- Gated progression, punishing traversal, and opaque maps are read as resisting the colonial "direct use-value" ideology of exploration, making the environment refuse the player's command.
Steam Pricing Research: From $0.0 to $69.99
The Steam marketplace is currently defined by a hyper-competitive landscape, characterized by a 27.8 percent increase in annual new releases and a significant expansion of free-to-play titles.
- Steam has seen a 27.8 percent annual increase in new releases, intensifying competition and forcing developers to use data-driven pricing to meet shifting consumer value expectations.
- Market saturation has made price points a primary indicator of quality, requiring developers to align their pricing directly with their production scope to remain competitive.
- The majority of releases are concentrated in the sub-$29.99 range, with $14.99 and $19.99 serving as key psychological anchors to optimize conversion rates.
The World Design of Hollow Knight: Silksongs
Mark Brown's Boss Keys analysis examines how Team Cherry built Pharloom, the twelve-area world of Hollow Knight: Silksong, and argues that its structure is a "concertina" that alternates between tightly guided, linear stretches and looser, exploratory ones.
- Hollow Knight: Silksong utilizes a concertina-style architecture that alternates between linear, goal-oriented sequences and open-ended exploration to manage player pacing.
- The game features a total of 45 boss encounters, split between 20 mandatory battles and 25 optional challenges that reward thorough exploration with power-ups.
- The progression structure evolves from a guided, key-and-lock first act into a highly open second act, concluding with a third act that introduces a corrupted world state.
The Game Awards 2025 Nominees on Live Streaming
The analysis evaluates the relationship between live streaming performance and The Game Awards 2025 nominations, assessing whether viewership metrics can effectively predict award winners.
- Grand Theft Auto VI dominates the 'Most Anticipated Game' category with 496,000 unique Twitch chat mentions over the past year, significantly outpacing Resident Evil Requiem at 76,000 mentions.
- League of Legends remains the most watched title in the 'Best Esports Game' category, generating 246.6 million hours watched and maintaining its status as the most-watched game overall.
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 leads the 'Game of the Year' nominees in streaming performance, recording 48.8 million hours watched during its peak month.
September’s Top PlayStation Games by Copies Sold: Horror and Sports Reign
September’s PlayStation sales performance highlights the continued dominance of major sports franchises alongside the enduring popularity of legacy titles and niche horror releases.
- EA and 2K dominated September PlayStation sales, with NBA 2K26 selling just under 2 million copies and FC 26 continuing to outperform other licensed sports titles globally.
- The free-to-play title Skate achieved a strong launch with over 15 million players across consoles, including 7.5 million on PlayStation, and generated approximately $3 million in cosmetic revenue on Steam.
- Borderlands 4 moved nearly 800,000 units on PlayStation, while Team Cherry’s Silksong sold over 600,000 units in its first month of release.
GMTK Digest: September 2025
The September 2025 edition of the Game Maker’s Toolkit digest serves as a curated industry update, focusing on significant software releases and critical analysis within the gaming sector.
- Hollow Knight: Silksong is defined by its expansive world design and precise, experimentation-focused gameplay mechanics.
- LEGO Voyagers failed to deliver a compelling co-op experience due to repetitive puzzle design and cumbersome construction mechanics.
- The September 2025 market landscape shows a distinct divide in quality between highly anticipated Metroidvania titles and underperforming puzzle-based projects.
What's the Point of Hard Games, Anyway?
The design of game difficulty serves as a critical tool for shaping player experience, balancing the desire for challenge with the risk of player alienation.
- High difficulty is a strategic tool used to heighten player satisfaction, reinforce narrative themes of struggle, and enforce intentional, non-repetitive playstyles.
- Effective difficulty design relies on fair mechanics that allow players to clearly identify mistakes and measure their personal improvement.
- Difficulty becomes counterproductive and drives player attrition when it relies on unfair mechanics like unpredictable enemy patterns, excessive backtracking, or tedious resource farming.
5 Things You Didn't Know About Hollow Knight: Silksong
Hollow Knight: Silksong's launch is the focus of this September 2025 GameDiscoverCo newsletter issue, which uses Steam and console data to explain why the sequel's performance is exceptional but hard to compare with typical releases.
- Hollow Knight: Silksong has reached an estimated 6 million players, driven by 3.2 million Steam sales, 1 million combined units on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, and 1.5 million Xbox Game Pass downloads.
- The sequel maintains a 79% player base overlap with the original Hollow Knight, with 22% of the original Steam owners purchasing the new title.
- The United States and China remain the primary markets, while Brazil and Argentina show significant traction in console and subscription-based demographics.
Hollow Knight: Silksong & Metroidvanias on Live Streaming
The release of Hollow Knight: Silksong serves as a pivotal case study for the Metroidvania genre’s performance on live-streaming platforms.
- Hollow Knight: Silksong achieved 19 million hours watched and 512,000 peak concurrent viewers in its debut week, making it the most successful Metroidvania launch on live-streaming platforms to date.
- The game's launch performance was driven by a broad, global base of streamers, with 842,000 hours of total airtime and top 10 streamers representing five different languages.
- Metroidvania viewership is highly cyclical and dependent on new releases or sequels, typically trailing live-service genres like Survival Games by a factor of 10 in sustained engagement.
Silksong: 5 Million Players in Three Days
Hollow Knight: Silksong passed 5 million players across all platforms within three days of its September 4, 2025 launch, including more than one million through Game Pass on console.
- Team Cherry’s Silksong reached 5 million players within three days of its release.
- The game generated $50 million in revenue from over 3 million copies sold on Steam alone during its first three days.
- Silksong entered the market with 5.2 million Steam wishlists, the highest total for any game in 2025.
